Connecting with Legacy
This week we discuss Legacy in the abstract and the concrete. We focus on what we leave behind when our physical presence is no longer in a room and how we build the legacy by which we want to be remembered. Episode Notes can be found here at uncoverthehuman.wearesiamo.com
Credits: Raechel Sherwood for Original Score Composition.
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Cristina Amigoni:
Today on Uncover The Human, we're going to talk about Legacy, and how it's tied to the intangibles of what we leave behind and how people feel when we leave the room, the project, the company, the community, the neighborhood.
Alex Cullimore:
Welcome to Uncover The Human where every conversation revolves around enhancing all the connections in our lives,
Cristina Amigoni:
whether that's with our families, co workers, or even ourselves,
Alex Cullimore:
when we can be our authentic selves, magic happens.
Cristina Amigoni:
This is Cristina Amigoni.
Alex Cullimore:
This is Alex Cullimore.
Both:
Let's dive in.
Guest:
Authenticity means freedom. Authenticity means going with your gut. Authenticity is 100% of yourself, not just the parts you think people want to see. But all of you. Being authentic means that you have integrity to yourself. It's the way our intuition is whispering something deep rooted and true. Authenticity is when you truly know yourself, you remember and connect to who you were before others told you who you should be. It's transparency relatability, no frills, no makeup, just being.
Alex Cullimore:
Well, welcome back to another week at Uncover The Human. This week, we wanted to discuss the topic of legacy. Legacy comes down to a few different things. I think people have a lot of different interpretations. Cristina, you actually pitched this one as an idea and you had just a personal experience that kind of led up to thinking about this. Do you want to elaborate on that a little bit?
Cristina Amigoni:
Definitely. Welcome back, the legacy piece came up from a very recent experience I had, I was talking to a former coworker, and she was saying how she was thinking about moving on to something else. And she had taken over something that we had worked together for quite a bit of time and so when I asked her who was going to replace her, she said that no one was going to replace her and it was going to look like whatever we worked on was just going to be pushed to the side and not continued. The first feeling I had was "Oh, my God, my old legacy of my time there is going to disappear. What does that mean about me? What does it say about what I've created?" And then halfway through that thought, I realized that my legacy waa not what I created, it wasn't the spreadsheets or the PowerPoints or the whatever framework, my legacy was really the connections I made with the people while I was there.
Alex Cullimore:
Such interesting points to bring up, because you brought that one up to me. And I had been thinking about that. And I generally write a lot of software code, that's what I tend to do day to day, and so that feels like that, that must be the legacy, right? You feel like it's the processes you leave behind. It's the department, it's the work that you did while you're there. And I started to realize that even in software, which has obviously very discrete, this is how it works, these are the instructions, this is how it continues, even then, the actual legacy isn't the code itself, it's just being part of the process of improving it, maybe think about it, you're plugging into, you're creating something that's supposed to automate a task or run some piece of software. And the idea is that that should improve in the future. All software is very much like that, you're supposed to be more iterative with it. And you're supposed to come up with, I don't know, easier user interfaces or just faster processing time, whatever it is that ends up going through, that's that should be improved on. It doesn't mean you didn't contribute to the process, or that's not your legacy, which is I hadn't ever thought of before.
Cristina Amigoni:
That's a great analogy, because especially software codes gets changed so much even by ourselves when we do it, but I think there's definitely a tendency to think of legacy as something tangible, like "Oh, I left behind a house for my kids, or I made this much money in the bank, or I closed these many deals while working in this company or whatever it was" when in reality, it really is has nothing to do with that. I talked to my husband about it, because he was doing a coaching exercise, actually to think about what would close people in his life say on his eulogy. And he didn't know what to say, but one of the things that he did realize is that it had nothing to do with how many number of books he would have published.
Alex Cullimore:
Right, because that just feels like a physical artifact. I actually looked up legacy just in the Merriam Webster dictionary to see what they would say about this. And it was very much just those physical artifacts, it said something about the amount of money or property you leave behind after you die, which is such a specific and very, very materialistic way to look at it. That's that's what you leave behind is this X amount of dollars or X amount of square feet in real estate.
Cristina Amigoni:
The risk with that, which I do believe that there are a lot of us do walk around with that kind of tactical, tangible way of defining legacy in mind. The risk with doing that is that what happens when the code gets replaced? What happens when an entire service offering that we've created gets replaced or not used? Then our identity goes with it, if we're attaching ourselves to that. So it can't be that, I guess , surface it can be that shallow that we are what we do, or we are what we produce. That's not who we are.
Alex Cullimore:
And it shouldn't be, if you think about it, because we kind of want those things to be replaced and improved over time. You see this all the time in business, if somebody is holding on to things, because it's just always the way it's been done, or it was set up that way, and we don't want to change that, that becomes eventually a blocker, if it's the right time, the right place to make that change, if you hold on to the past, and you try and determine that it should be held on to, because there is some legacy attached to it as if that inherently is the value, and the fact that it already exists. is the value, then you lose out on the opportunity to make something different or better or new and improve on what needs to be improved on. It's kind of like, what was it Kodak, which is the film company, and then digital cameras came out. And they were like, "No, we're not gonna jump on this bandwagon." And now you don't see Kodak anymore.
Cristina Amigoni:
Exactly, and that's when instead of attaching to a just cause, like Simon Sinek would say, you're attaching yourself to what you're actually producing.
Alex Cullimore:
And you actually have personal identity, your personal capital. They talk a lot about that, if you go through just the psychology of things like motivation and self worth, it talks about needing to understand that there's this basic core of worth and functionality, and it doesn't have to do with all the things that we like to ascribe it to. We're kind of marketed to believe that the importance is in having a bigger house, having a nicer car, whatever it is, we're kind of told, that's what we should be pursuing. We should be pursuing careers that have X amount of importance as very poorly defined, just so that you can try and keep pushing forward and move up. But that's not incredibly helpful and it kind of takes away from the idea that there's this base level importance and worth that we already have, that that's where the legacy really starts to come into, in my opinion.
Cristina Amigoni:
You brought up a good very good point, especially in careers, we attach ourselves to the ladder the career ladder, and the titles and all of those things. And it's like, "oh I gotta make VP but the time I'm 35. And I have to own my own company, and be the CEO of it by the time I'm 40, so that I can retire at 50. "Okay, in the meantime, you haven't lived your life. So you can retire at 50 If you make it to that, but when you look back at your life, what have you seen? I mean, what is it the number of projects you've closed? Is it the number of sales you were able to make? Is it the dollar amount? I mean, what is it that you want to get on your tombstone?
Alex Cullimore:
Can you imagine if that was how eulogies and funerals were, somebody just opens your LinkedIn page, and they're like "well, they went to college at Boston College for these four years, and then they graduated right into a marketing coordinator position for three years at XYZ firm". Is anybody gonna be moved by that? Is anybody gonna really connect to that? Does anybody remember you for those things?
Cristina Amigoni:
Exactly, that's where it is. And so, if our legacy really is more defined as how people remember us, and how we've impacted them, and if we bring it back to our daily life, then we can be more mindful and conscious about what we do when we're in a meeting how we treat people. And I always think about - not that I'm perfect or anything, I've had plenty of bad days, I have plenty of bad moments every single day - when I leave the room, and I think that's not exactly how I want people to remember me from that interaction. But that's also what brings me back to "next time, I can do better. Next time, I can be a lot more conscious and mindful about how I want people to remember me when I'm not in the room"
Alex Cullimore:
That's a really good way of looking at it. How do you want people to remember you? And I always think of that Maya Angelou quote, which is "People won't remember what you said, they won't remember what you did, but they will remember how you made them feel." And so that goes both ways you can either make people feel better, if you can make people connect, you can have them want to be around, or you can drive that more negatively, and they can feel like they need to avoid, they need to shut down, they need to move away.
Cristina Amigoni:
That's a very important quote, because there can so often be a disconnect between the words we use, and the way they come out, and the energy we put in them so that I could say, "Hey, I care about you." But it's not quite connected to reality of how I feel. If I don't feel cared for, then your words mean nothing. And what I'm going to remember is that I didn't feel cared for.
Alex Cullimore:
Yeah, I kind of think of it -and I love that analogy of just the language of it- because you can say all the right things, but obviously, as humans, we are interpreting either the tone or the context, at least as much, if not far more than the actual words themselves. It's kind of like when somebody smiles and they say the smile didn't reach their eyes. That smile is perfunctory, it's just something that is there, but you don't feel like they're actually happy. You don't feel like they actually have whatever connection to the moment. They're just smiling in a very statue like facial expression. It's like the representation of a smile, but none of the meaning.
Cristina Amigoni:
I think some of the studies say words mean 10% of actual communication. I mean, everything else is nonverbal. So that's where feelings come from. The feelings come from the nonverbal and the feelings come from, in my mind, also from consistency. So you can tell me that you care about me all you want, but then when you turn around and don't act as if you do, that's what I'm going to remember. And if it continues to happen, then it's not just a one time, it was a bad moment, bad mood, stressful day, whatever it was. But if it's constant, it's like, "okay, you can care about me all you want, but if you keep excluding me, then Do you really? Is that just something you're saying?"
Alex Cullimore:
That's a really good way of putting it. I like the idea of that, because it really boils down to the trust and the consistency, if you can consistently trust somebody is there, doing the, I don't want to say right thing, but somebody is there and cares about you, is there and actually has your back. That has to be consistent and representative in reality, not just in statements. You can't say, "Oh, yeah, I'm here for you." I think we've all had and I definitely remember experiencing this at some of our workplaces. There's people who will be like, "yeah, I have an open door policy, come right on in, everything's fine." All the words are there,but in reality, nobody's going to approach them, nobody's going to believe that that is truly a system of support they can have.
Cristina Amigoni:
I remember you talked about writing a blog post on "it's not an open door policy, it's a glass door policy". The words are there, it's open door, but every time you try to walk into it, you smash your face against the glass with a "I don't have time go find somebody else. You should know, go figure it out. Why are you asking this question again, or silence, or just total ghosting, which is even worse than being told to go figure it out.
Alex Cullimore:
And that it comes down to how you make people feel, they know they're supposed to be able to go through that door, but because your internal feeling is not there, because you know that that's not really the actual feeling, that's not the real deal, for lack of a better term, that if they go in there, they're going to be told, "go figure it out". If they go in there, they're going to be told "you should know this by now." Now, you know that if you go in there, you're essentially opening yourself up to feeling like you're not good enough, at which point that's the legacy that person is leaving on you. And the legacy then of the whatever initiative you're working on, is going to suffer because people are not going to actually be able to connect at a level that will allow them to have the open communication to build something that would be bigger, to do something that that old, I believe it's a Chinese proverb, the old plant trees that you will never sit under the shade of. If you can't have that trust, and people are just hiding from each other, there's no chance you're gonna make something that's going to be big enough to have that form of legacy either, that external legacy outside of the personal feeling.
Cristina Amigoni:
Very true. And that's a great analogy as well. The importance of legacy, it's really about "what are we here to do?" And it only works if we connect it to our values. And so if my value is,, if I had to choose a quote, to describe what I want my legacy to be or how I want people to remember me, when they're reading my eulogy, is really "Be somebody who makes everybody feel like there's somebody", that's the feeling that I want people to feel. And so the way I do that is by connecting with people and making sure that I listen and connect, and I'm there and I support. And, you know, I establish trust, and it's consistent. So I don't just listen once by never listen again. Or I don't just check in once and never check in again. And it's being vulnerable, it's being authentic, it's people knowing that "Oh, I know I can count on Cristina to pick up the phone when I call or answer a text message when I send it, or whatever it is. And I can also count on her to tell me, 'Hey, this is a bad day for me and I need your help."
Alex Cullimore:
That's a great point, that having that level of trust is incredibly important. That's something that I definitely feel like I've needed to work on more, I've had a bad habit of not answering texts nearly as often as I should or as quickly as I should. And some of that comes down to this weird fear of disappointing people like you, if you don't have the right, if you feel like you don't have good news to deliver, it can be hard to deliver any news at all. But that silence then becomes your legacy, that lack of communication that ghosting becomes the feeling and legacies, the feeling of absence the feeling of not being around which, at least in my opinion, is not really what I'm going for.
Cristina Amigoni:
It's crazy, because, and this could turn into it branch of many side tracked podcast topics, that silence is literally deadly. I have no idea when somebody came up with the silence is golden piece, because it really isn't. Silence is deadly. We just can't, as humans, we can not handle lack of data. And so what we do is we create our own stories. And because our stories come from a place of uncertainty and fear and Gremlins, and our low levels of doubting ourselves, then the story is always going to be some big nightmare of having been abandoned.
Alex Cullimore:
And that's when it becomes important to make your intentions clear, because we all have bad days like you were saying there's always bad days where you don't feel like you showed up as well. As you could have, you weren't achieving the result you wanted to achieve, you weren't being the person you want it to be in that moment in that time. But if you just have that moment, and then you let it go, and you don't come back and reapproach that, to your point, the other person is writing the story in their head. And if the only piece of concrete information they have to base that story off of is that you were in a bad mood, or that it came across negatively, or maybe you felt irritated by something else. And that made you short in your conversation with another person. If that person writes a whole story, and you don't jump in and try and correct some details on that, they are now left with creating an entire storyline based off of one negative viewpoint, which is unlikely to be able to spin into a very positive viewpoint, or at least feel like they would have the right attitude for it.
Cristina Amigoni:
I think in marketing, they talk about how one bad review really erases 100 good reviews. And that's what happens in our brains. It's like one bad experience. One word of that shamed us, one non- picked up phone call, one time of being excluded, whatever it is, will completely erase two years or three years or however many months or instances of being there. Because all of a sudden, I can't trust anymore. Because I don't know the next time what's going to happen. Because now I'm like, "Well, next time, it could be back to what I used to believe, which is this person is always there for me. Or it could be back to this person excluding me. How do I
Alex Cullimore:
And that's know that?" exactly the point. And I think it kind of falls back, and this is, again, the more we're talking about this more, I start to feel like so much of legacy and connection has to do with that trust component. Because it is that one bad review becomes 10 good reviews, you're going to have to win to negate that, you're going to have to then proactively do it. And that goes back to the quote that I have seen attributed to Mark Twain, and I'm pretty sure it's his that "Trust, runs away on a horse but arrives on foot", which is to say it just disappears incredibly quickly, and takes a very long time a lot longer and a lot lower speed to come back.
Cristina Amigoni:
Very good quote, there's definitely a few quotes out there on trust that give that sense of it takes nothing to break trust. And it takes forever to build it the first time and rebuild it the second time, if the effort and work and, I guess, care to rebuild it is even there.
Alex Cullimore:
Which is why it's kind of difficult to strap the idea of legacy or what you want your legacy to be to one singular goal, or you know, to your point, I'm going to be VP by 40, or whatever it is. If that is your goal, you might be kind of shooting yourself in the foot along the way there because you've made that the entire goal. But the consistency portion that you brought up before and the trust becomes so important, like yes, they were the VP for XY and Z years. But before that, you know, maybe there was , it sounds negative, but maybe there was a backstabbing or politics to get to that point or after that. They just settled in, they reached the goal they wanted to reach. And now they stopped, stopped pushing and started to gain the reputation / legacy of not trying anymore. When you strap it to that one singular goal rather than the overall practice and feeling, then it can become something that you sacrifice things, sacrifice your own values to get to or don't have values after you achieve.
Cristina Amigoni:
It really makes you think, what do you want people to remember? And it goes back to Maya Angelou's quote "people won't remember what you did." You may remember what you did. And even then you memory will probably go away at some point and be like, "oh, wow, I don't remember that. I was part of 75 projects, because I was just doing one at a time." Oh, but that's not the point. The point "how have you helped people feel better, and part of a community, not alone, supported, laugh?" I mean, laugh, I was thinking about that, and I was thinking how laughter is the thing that I remember the most about people in my past. And it's the thing that I always find I go back to in relationships, if I'm laughing in a relationship, then I know that the relationship is still healthy and valid, and it's gonna stay in my legacy. When we stop laughing, at least for me, when I stop laughing in a relationship, then the relationship is either dead or very close to dying.
Alex Cullimore:
Yeah, that's a great point. laughter is kind of this expression that either I can be an expression of discomfort, I suppose when we laugh nervously, but mostly when comfortable laughter that is building us up. That is an expression of some amount of trust and some amount of shared value, where you feel the comfort to let your guard down and have the laughter and that kind of goes back to the overall idea of authenticity for this whole podcast. I mean, we went want our legacy to feel authentic to us. And part of that is being able to have that comfort in our own legacy, in our own experiences with everyone else and expanding that to the people who are around us, they have to feel comfortable enough for there to be laughter. I think laughter is a great token. What a great token and physical, memorable attribute and physical moment that we can all relate to, to say, things are going well here, there's genuine laughter. And we talked about belly laughs versus laughs like when it really something hits you at your core, and you're comfortable enough to basically let your guard down and have what physiologically is basically like a breathing problem. That is laughter.
Cristina Amigoni:
Well, it can be a breathing problem. I'll know for sure that one of the things that I'll remember when we're however, many weeks or years down the line and have hundreds of episodes, hopefully we'll make it there. I'm sure that one of the best recordings that I remember is the one when we were doing the trailer or the outro, or the intro I can remember and I couldn't stop laughing. So we had to retake 20 times. I just could not stop laughing every time we would say, Okay, take 11 and I would just start laughing.
Alex Cullimore:
I think that's a great example of everything we've just talked about. Because also, I don't remember the specifics of it. I don't remember exactly why it started to fall that way, but it's not really even important. It's just a great memory. It's something that brings that feeling of joy. And actually, you were just talking about this last week, you're talking about dream interpretation. And how it's about the feeling when I re-access that memory, and dreams are to some extent re-accessing memories and sorting through them, you are re-accessing the feeling more than anything else.
Cristina Amigoni:
Yeah, it was a very interesting little calm Spark, I guess it's like there are many podcasts are like 10 minutes long that I listened to. And it was with an expert whose name I can't remember, but we'll put in the in the podcast notes for everybody else to listen to. He was talking about how interpreting dreams has nothing to do with understanding the story. It has everything to do with understanding and remembering how you felt in the story. Because that's your subconscious telling you how you really feel about something.
Alex Cullimore:
That's an interesting point, because I recently actually had a dream in which, so just a very little context, I'll use first names, but it's not important to the story. So my first job, there was one of the partners was named Justin. And we didn't necessarily talk much or know each other very well. But I remember him well. He's a super nice guy, he was very good at his job. And everybody in the company really liked him. And when I was much younger, when I was growing up, I had a neighbor, also named Justin and I had this weird dream a couple weeks back that there was in my mind, I knew this was Justin, the partner that I had known in early in my career. But the entire face was more mashed with Justin, the neighbor. And the feeling was there because that neighborhood and we didn't necessarily get along well. And he it wasn't like we got along poorly. But he was always a little bit standoffish and seemed a little bit almost judgmental. And when I was just starting out in my career, I was very much worried about making good impressions with everybody who was partners at this the consulting firm I was working at. And so the dream had a lot to do with trying to figure it out and guess what that person's reactions were. And so if I think about that, in the context, you were just talking about the feeling there was the feeling of trying to understand and move through and figure out what you may or may not be being judged on. That was the feeling that I had tied from both of them. And there were there are details here and there that I can see playing into it. But that was the feeling of the dream. And that in retrospect, it was a feeling similar or common to a lot of my interactions with those two different people.
Cristina Amigoni:
What would be even more interesting is now that you have realized that and you extracted that from the dream, how is that relating to your current life? Why are you feeling that you have to revisit those emotions, in your dreams, of somebody may or may not be judging you and how are they judging you?
Alex Cullimore:
That's a great question. I'd have to think back to what was going on that week, there's got to be something that was feeling particularly in doubt as to how other people would react externally. It's something that I feel like I've worked on a lot to try and focus on, because it's something that you can't attach for the same reasons as we're talking about legacy not being something you should attach to an external or materialistic endpoint. I've worked a lot to try and make sure you're not attaching too much value to other people's feelings because then you're setting yourself up for misery, if you're not, if you don't trust the person, but you're still basically giving them the power over how you feel about things.
Cristina Amigoni:
That the feelings is really where it comes down to. I mean, one of the things that I always see is this whole idea, that I'm sure we've talked about in past podcasts and will probably come up in every single podcast from now on, is that we can't detach from our feelings. And we can expect us to be humans without emotions. So the whole "check your emotions at the door when you're going to work" it's just setting you up for failure. It's interesting when I think about that, in my interactions with people I try to focus on this person is telling me this, this and this, what's the feeling that they're trying to convey that I need to understand here, because it can't be about the spreadsheet, or it can't be about whatever it is that they're talking about, there's got to be some reason why this is standing out.
Alex Cullimore:
It's always something a little deeper than whatever the surface level is suggested. And we kind of miss out when we try and make it only about thes urface level. But how many times have you had interactions with people where they got hung up on something like that, hung up on something that was just a tangible result by a spreadsheet, process, or something that they felt went right or wrong, and they end up going to happy hours and talking about that over and over again, as if that thing is the issue. And generally, the core issue is that that relationship is just suffering,
Cristina Amigoni:
Something made that spreadsheet the important thing, something made that three words that they heard, what they remember. And I do, I don't believe that our brains do retain all of our memories, but we don't clearly remember everything that we experience. So what sticks? What gets written in us? And when we think about that, when we deal with other people, when interacting with them, that's the legacy. It's like Maya Angelou said, people are going to remember how we made them feel, they're not going to remember everything else. That's what gets written in the story.
Alex Cullimore:
And that's the important part. If you think about, actually, now I think back on it, anytime that I've had to do, and occasionally in consulting, you'll either have an engagement where it seems like a difficult client or something. And so you start to do things like keep paper trails, and document every decision in emails and things like that, when it starts to come down to needing those physical things, they always kind of joke in legal circles, that the contract is only really important when somebody is violating it. When people have a good relationship, there's going to be room for some push and pull, it's not going to be just down to the letter of whatever the contract was signed, it's when the relationship starts going bad or something isn't working, then suddenly everybody has to pull out. That's where contracts come in handy. Because now you have this direct record that's supposed to be a whole encompassing statement on what should or shouldn't be happening. And nobody would ever refer to that unless things go bad.
Cristina Amigoni:
Good point, nobody goes back and reads the fine lines of it, whatever 25 page statement of work, until they feel like something went off, something didn't get done, or they're feeling guilty, or whatever it is, but there's a feeling behind wanting to go back and actually reading that.
Alex Cullimore:
And when you get backed into that corner, and you are now just responding from what specifically has to happen, or what, what is the very black and white facts of something like, well, this spreadsheet has x thing in it it shouldn't have or you know, the status should be different in the project at this time. Or, oh, the contract actually says this one minor thing, which could be up for a little bit of interpretation and wording, nobody would interpret that until you need to. And I feel like personally, when I am backed into that corner, that's when you stop feeling like you're connected, that's when you stop feeling like you're anything. You kind of shut down into the shell of a person that has to respond with only the hard facts because you've lost the ability to communicate at any other level. And now it's going to be an argument between who has the facts that seem most defensible, at which point you're, you're trapped in a corner, you're not connected anymore.
Cristina Amigoni:
It's true, the connection gets severed at that point. And it's just like trust, when the connection gets severed in that way, it's so hard to rebuild. And so from now on, it doesn't become a project where you're helping and providing excellence and doing the best that you can to provide a service that can truly help the company or team or people. You're just checking boxes. And that's actually one of the things that always makes me realize I'm in the wrong place or something went wrong, is when the project or initiative turns into "well, we just have to check the box and then we can walk away satisfied". There is no satisfaction in just checking the boxes. There is no excellence in checking the boxes. And there's definitely no legacy that I want to leave behind for having checked the boxes.
Alex Cullimore:
That makes for a great eulogy, she did check the boxes.
Cristina Amigoni:
Yeah, exactly.
Alex Cullimore:
That's a really good point. It's something that if you're backed into that point, you're just reacting from a defensive point of view, you're saying, "well, we did our part, you know, who cares whether this works or it doesn't. As long as we have covered ourselves to where we can't really have any blame, we said, these are the boxes to check. We checked those boxes." That person, that customer that whatever. Are they going to refer you more business? Are they going to show up at your funeral? Probably not. Like they're gonna they're not there anymore. For any kind of connection? They're like, well, they did technically, the bare minimum. That's not exactly a legacy that tends to inspire more connection and other legacy to be built on.
Cristina Amigoni:
That reminds me of this podcast that I just listened to, with Chris Voss, the author of Never Split the Middle, I think, Never Split the Difference., thank you for that. And he was talking about how there's really no trusting somebody else if they keep making you feel bad, and to the point where, if you continuously want to win in projects, or want to win deals, or want to do something that makes the other person feel bad about themselves, you'll lose business. So you get to the point where nobody actually wants to come and work with you, because they know that they're going to lose, and they know they're gonna feel bad when they lose. So are you really winning? When you're just severing relationships? Are you winning when you're creating all these great things, and winning all these projects, but nobody actually wants to work with you, unless they have to?
Alex Cullimore:
You're cutting your circle, so much shorter, so much smaller, everything is going to just start to close in. You have fewer and fewer relationships, so fewer and fewer people to turn to, at which point you may have a common roster of a few people that you've worked with before. But if you similarly treat the relationship, without that trust in that legacy mindset, then you start to shorten your circle even more. And now you've got fewer people to turn to. And so much of human life comes down to, and I mean that in both the workplace and just general living sense, so much of it boils down to having people around. And I don't mean that just in like avoiding loneliness. But that's how you get opportunities, that's how you find growth is having people there to help, people there to turn to people, when you have good days, bad days in between, and if you have that level of trust in a business or personal relationship, you can build on it. And when you don't, it will shrink.
Cristina Amigoni:
How many people can you turn to and know that they'll pick up the phone? If you left, whatever it was, and whether it was a company or a project, or a city or a neighborhood or school, whatever it was, and you can actually genuinely reach out to most of the people you've interacted with, then that's your legacy. The legacy that you're leaving behind is that you don't have anybody that will actually pick up the phone if you call.
Alex Cullimore:
And that's very sad, just to consider.
Cristina Amigoni:
It is, it takes humanity out of every interaction, every community, every whatever it is. And so it's one of those things that reminds me how when you make a decision, and you use, and this was another podcast that kind of connected the dots for me, and I can remember which one it is, but I'm sure I'l; dig that out of my memories, but the whole saying it's business, it's not personal, that's just justifying your lack of ethics and morals.
Alex Cullimore:
Yeah, there are times where you have to make unpopular decisions, I suppose. But everything is a little bit personal. Because as we have well identified at this point, there is no real separation between work and life, you are there, you're the person who is there. If you feel like you get shunned, you get pushed off of something, a deal or something that you want it to be a part of, if you are left in the cold, essentially, or for whatever reason, feel like you are wronged. When you're not the one doing the wronging, it's pretty hard to separate that feeling from taking it personally.
Cristina Amigoni:
The way I answered that question, whenever I hear that the whole "it's just business, it's not personal. Well, the answer to that it's " it's personal to the person to the individual that's impacted. It may not be personal to you, but it's personally on the receiving end." And so, again, like I said, what you want to leave behind, because you can make it so that it's not about positive feedback all the time, where it's not about giving people what they want all the time. And it's not about not having the hard conversations. It's about having the hard conversations and being able to say, "you know what, the scope changed in this project. So sorry, let's see if we can work something out. But it doesn't look like you're going to be needed anymore." I would rather have the conversation every single day because it's a human conversation, then, whatever the alternative to that is, that makes me feel like I was not good enough.
Alex Cullimore:
That's a great point. And that actually brings up the idea that you can work this from both angles, if you consider the reason that I think most people try to avoid that conversation, and they end up sidestepping and generally hurting the relationship more is because they don't want to go deliver that news, right? They don't want and maybe they've had enough bad reactions, there are certainly people out there who would have a bad reaction to that, take it incredibly, personally immediately, and then try and turn that around on you. And so in the future, now you're avoiding that conversation. And to bring it back to what I started with. That's why it becomes something you can consider from both sides. Because when you receive news like that, it's important to also take that from a more wide point of view, when somebody says" "Hey, we just won't need you on this project anymore." You can help out the overall process, not only with your relationship, but the overall world, so that people don't have the experience of having to defend against personal reactions. If we can internalize that, and say, "I understand that it's disappointing not to be able to work on this, but I really appreciate you telling me this". That then encourages the behavior you want to see in the future anyway, which is people should have this conversation with me because I don't want to be left out in the cold and find out later.
Cristina Amigoni:
When we talk about, clearly, we've given lots of examples of what legacy not to leave behind. And so the legacy to leave behind to me, it goes back to your values. And so it goes back to really as an individual what is important to me, what energizes me when I wake up in the morning? When do I have that feeling of " I just made a difference. My life has meaning because this happened." And once you know that, then you know, again, like without, going for perfection, because none of us are perfect. But always keep that in mind. When something happens when you have a piece of information, when you're in a meeting, when you're working with a team, when you're interacting with your neighbors. Just remember, "when you walk away, when I walk away, what do I want them to remember?"
Alex Cullimore:
I like that a lot. And that's what you want. That's what you can focus on. And when and I consider that personally, the things that I want to be remembered for tend to line up, as you say, with your values, because it's what you're especially excited about. For a long time, I wanted to be a stand up comedian. And that meant that I really wanted to be seen as funny. And that it became almost more difficult to do for a little bit until I could detach some of the personhood to it. But it was aligned with what I wanted to be remembered for.
Cristina Amigoni:
Well, you are funny.
Alex Cullimore:
I appreciate that.
Cristina Amigoni:
Very good job.
Alex Cullimore:
I'm now validated, I'm done here, guys, my legacies checked, check to the legacy box.
Cristina Amigoni:
I'm sure that every single person that we know, at least in common can attest to the fact that you are funny.
Alex Cullimore:
But actually, that brings up the connection point is really incredible, too. I mean, laughter, we were talking about laughter being the indication of that. And that's kind of how it felt externally, you know, doing comedy, you want to have that laughter. But it also applies to just the general relationships we have, when you feel like you have that connection, you feel like something has grown beyond yourself. And that's a pretty otherworldly feeling. Sometimes when you feel like you're connected to something so much larger than what you are. And you just get to have this little impact, which you don't know what the ripple effects are going to be. But you get to push or help somebody move in a direction, which they're going to want to explore and expand, and they'll feel more comfortable to do. So we actually just recently had some conversations within our company SIAMO itself, where we got to boil down to what people like and don't like. And I think we came out of that feeling like there was a lot more comfort and a lot more trust all around. And it had nothing to do with the specifics of what needed to be done. It just had to do with making that human connection and keeping that human relationship.
Cristina Amigoni:
And it reminded me of the fact that if you actually want to read your eulogies, and know what people think about you, beforethe end date on your life, ask them to write a LinkedIn review.
Alex Cullimore:
Hmm, yeah.
Cristina Amigoni:
And so when I did that a couple of years ago, and some are voluntary. A lot of them were like "Can I write me a review? I would love to I can write you a review as well. And so it was a mutual thing. Those are the days when I go back to "how do people remember me? And when I look back at my LinkedIn reviews actually. There is nothing in there that says, she succeeded X number of projects she created 150 online courses, she talked on the phone for these many hours and closed these many deals, none of that. Like the things that people have said and one of the things that have touched me the most it was actually from our friend Bryan, who is probably going to be happy when he hears this and he was referenced. When he said something like "when she leaves the room, she leaves a beacon of light so bright that the people she leads can't help but follow". That's the legacy.
Alex Cullimore:
And that's a great point too, LinkedIn reviews, anytime you ask for a letter of recommendation, you want the people who are just thrilled to even have the opportunity to recommend you because you've made that connection. I mean the reviews that stand out are the ones where they might talk about "they ended up closing $5 million in business." But usually the ones that stick in my mind anyway, are the ones that finished that with "hey, they closed $5 million in business, and they lifted the team with them or they are just a pleasure to work with throughout the highs and the lows of the stressful sales cycle." Whatever it is, there's there's always that human element where that's where a review suddenly goes from a good review to a glowing review.
Cristina Amigoni:
You bring up an excellent point that reviews are not about just individuals. They are about companies too. I mean, Glassdoor does that, but also,any other type of review that you have out there really comes back to how the company made somebody feel like I'm an Apple, crazy fan. And it's not just because I like the products. It's mostly because I like how I'm treated by Apple. When I go into the store, when I call up for support, whatever it is, I love the treatment.
Alex Cullimore:
And we connect to that, because that's what we're constantly, if you think about it, that's what we're always judging every interaction on. And that's why it's very short sighted to say things like it's not business, it's personal. And that only comes from the side of somebody who's doing something less good. That never comes from the person who's being slighted. Nobody's ever like, yep, they shafted me on this deal, but it's not personal, it's just business. It's always the person who's doing the shafting. And when you think about it, we're always judging our experience in relation to that, whether it's talking to Apple, whether it's talking to other people, whether it's sealing contracts. Whatever we're doing, we're always judging that mostly on how we feel and how we come out of that. I couldn't tell you the details of half the conversations I have in the day, but I can tell you the general gist of where those conversations went, was it positive? Was it negative? Did I feel better after it? Did I not?
Cristina Amigoni:
Getting to the end of the da and be like "do I feel drained or do I feel energized?" And if the answer is I feel drained, and that's the answer, day after day, week after week, for months? Well, something is wrong.
Alex Cullimore:
And that's actually a great exercise. I remember you were talking about one of the there's a journaling exercise where for 30 days, you list at least one or two things that energize you and one or two things that drained you during the day and the entire idea being that you're moving towards understanding better, what energizes and or demotivates you. And when you start to document things that way, you really start to get a clear path between "what direction do I want to be moving? And what direction am I moving? And what direction do I want to avoid?" You get all three of those because you're starting to see the patterns fall in exactly the "How are you feeling like you reacted to this? Is there a positive net effect on your energy or a negative net effect?
Cristina Amigoni:
And energy it's a big thing, as you know very well, with my coach training on Energy Leadership, that's one of the things that we get trained on is to, in conversations interactions, read the energy, not the words. So listen for the energy in every interaction. So that's what we focus on. The story is relevant, but it's not. The story helps understanding how it person feels about it, because somebody can talk about going to the restaurant and you can feel the energy being super happy about it, or they can talk about going to a restaurant, you can feel from the energy that it was a miserable experience.
Alex Cullimore:
If only that was like a button option on Amazon reviews. Five stars doesn't necessarily tell you what the actual energy is. And sometimes it's fun just to go through and read Amazon reviews, because there are some that come through with that just emotional connection to whatever and some that come through with the opposite. Like it's an emotional connection, but for a bad reason. Or they're just "yep, this worked." Or this didn't work, which I think generally tends to be unless it's one item that's supposed to do one thing. Nobody's gonna be marking, yes, this was helpful.
Cristina Amigoni:
It's true. And especially when you have products and things and "Well sure if the code does exactly what it's supposed to do. And I'm gonna turn around and use my spreadsheet because I really don't like how I feel when I have to use this new tool."
Alex Cullimore:
And there's even little tiny things you can see in Apple products, for example, and I've heard this mentioned a couple times, and weirdly, it's something that comes up, it definitely feels like I can relate to the feeling and I'm curious if you relate to it as well. The text messaging function when you are messaging, another iPhone, the text messages show up in blue, and that's what the responses come through. And when you have a group chat of all iPhones, it will come back in these blue speech bubbles. Then when you have somebody who's not on iPhone, it comes back in green. And weirdly, even though it's not like an unpleasant green, it's just different enough that you immediately note the experience and that feeling is there. And there's sometimes a feeling of like, Oh, I don't know if this, sometimes when I see that delivered as a text message, I'm like, "oh, did that, did that actually go through?" And that's not really fair. But it's this weird feeling that ends up being pushed through just based on this color difference?
Cristina Amigoni:
Never thought about it. It's true. It is a very different feeling.
Alex Cullimore:
Apple is gifted with user design, I think there's probably something done on purpose there.
Cristina Amigoni:
Oh, I'm sure there are. I mean, they definitely focus on how a person is gonna feel about things when they use. The user experiences is based on "is this easy enough that you don't have to learn how to do it?" And that's the premise of a lot of how they develop things. I think
Alex Cullimore:
All the way down to like the packaging when you open an iPhone package, and it fits exactly in there. And they've neatly folded the charger underneath that, like, even that is a little moment of emotional reaction.
Cristina Amigoni:
Exactly. And no, Apple is not a sponsor on this podcast, we jut like it.
Alex Cullimore:
Not yet. All right, Apple and Calm. We've plugged both of your products, come on down. Because if I don't have X number of sponsors on my podcast, my legacy will be
Cristina Amigoni:
We might as incomplete. well stop recording right now then.
Alex Cullimore:
I have learned my lesson here. I need boxes checked.
Cristina Amigoni:
Exactly. Well, that was a good conversation on legacy. I think that brings up some thinking through that feeling of "what do we want people to remember us for?"
Alex Cullimore:
And one thing that I would just to one last kind of anecdote that has stuck with me for a long time on legacy, it actually came from, I was listening to a podcast years and years ago, and President Obama was on it. It was when he was President, and he was talking about health care. And this has been after the ACA was rolled out. And there was, of course, the original snafu where the website didn't work for a couple weeks. But he was talking about, you know, there's a lot of heat and it had gone on for a few months. And now people have started talking about the good and bad portions of having this marketplace health insurance. And he was on this podcast talking about "Yeah, we know that it's not perfect. It had to be a step in the right direction, we want to move healthcare towards being something better and more useful. And we had to take this first step." And I just bring that up because it had such an impact on me, because I had never considered how laws and life in general moves along in not a giant on or off moment of healthcare works or it doesn't work it, things move along in a much more steady path from A to B. And you have to be willing to take the steps in between. And that's one thing that I think of when I think of legacy is having that longer journey towards building things and not being so much discouraged by the ups and downs of it. But understanding the overall progress of it. Because we're never going to be perfect. We're never going to have every day be a good day. But if we think of legacy as a practice, like we are thinking of authenticity as a practice, it's something that can help us understand that ups and downs are going to happen. It's not going to be a consistent, up or a consistent down, but we want to move in a general direction and leave people with the impression that there is lift, there is hope, and there is optimism.
Cristina Amigoni:
That's a wonderful way to put it. And as you were talking about it before you even use the word practice. That's what I was thinking. It's a daily practice. Just like authenticity. You know, just like how we show up is a daily practice. And yes, we're gonna show up badly. And we're going to show up in a way that we look back and we're like, "oh, god, can I just have a time machine that erases what I just said or did?" Well, there is a time machine. It's called apologizing.
Alex Cullimore:
Yes, bring up that that happened. And that can go from something that would have been the initiation of the end of the relationship to something that you will laugh about forevermore. Like, weren't you just talking recently about how we were starting some project and one of your friends because you had to delay on getting some of the information to her, she thought she was going to be let go from the project. It becomes a much funnier anecdote afterwards, but only if you go back to actually explain "Oh, no". Either I wasn't showing up how I needed to or there was a misinterpretation here. That goes from something that can start to end a relationship to something that can be a huge, just shared anecdote and a feeling of a foundational moment that you get to build off of.
Cristina Amigoni:
It's so wonderful. And one of the things that I learned in that moment was I had the choice to show up and so it wasn't just "Oh, no, you're still fine, the project is still like question mark, but you are definitely in it if it happens." For me it was beyond that, because I did or didn't do something here that made her feel this way. And so that's my learning lesson. Not what's happening with the project, what's happening with the project that I should communicate anyway. So that was my first question back. It was first of all, after I validated that she wasn't getting excluded from the project. After I did that, I asked her, I got on the phone and I was like "what did I do or not do to make you think that I would not want you on this project, if that's what came through, because I need to correct that behavior. And I need to apologize."
Alex Cullimore:
And there's a time machine right there, there's only not only the time machine is fixing that, but you're traveling into the future at that point, and fixing that in the future, or understanding how to better phrase something or when, even if it's just in that relationship with that one person, because they've had some experience that would lead to that reaction. Even if it's just that relationship, you now have a foundation to build off of in the future. And it might be something that's even more general, you understand that "well, maybe people feel x way, if I communicate it that way. And now I can communicate it better to a wider audience."
Cristina Amigoni:
And if you keep that in mind as well for future interactions, and "Okay, this one person felt this way and she actually spoke up about it, how many other people Am I making feel that way?" And back to my values, that is not at all how I want people to feel around me.
Alex Cullimore:
Once you start to get in the habit of just going out and saying "hey, this doesn't feel right, or this does feel right". You get the opportunity for people to either correct, if they didn't mean something, and they happen to be making you feel like there was some hidden meaning that they missed, or they're feeling left out of, you get a chance to understand that and to explicitly correct "No, that's not, that's not what I mean, here, I can see why that might feel that way. I'm sorry, if that came across there." Here's what I really mean. Or you can even come up with, "Yeah, I totally understand why that came off that way. I was having an awful day that day. And so that probably came off there." I apologize for the times when my attitude or my demeanor is going to be affected by the things that are happening outside in life, that will always happen, we'll always have some amount of spillover. But it doesn't mean that it's actually personal to the person you're conveying that to.
Cristina Amigoni:
And it goes back to listen for the energy, not the words, just because somebody says "I'm fine", what is happening behind the words? That's the legacy.
Alex Cullimore:
And that's definitely I think, an experience many people can
relate to where:
"Hey, are you mad? No, I'm fine. And that's, you know, gender irrelevant that happens both sides of the relationship with that, but you're listening for the energy at that point, the second you have that long term relationship that has gone on for long enough for you like, Yeah, no, you're definitely not acting fine. I've known you for X amount of years. This is not "fine".
Cristina Amigoni:
If we, and I'm sure we'll do a podcast on energy levels, but I'm fine is a very typical level three. And level three is that compromise. It's the "I give up and so let's just move on from this." And so I remember working with one of our mutual friends, and she was going through a very stressful time that I was trying to support her with, with a lot of projects. And every time I asked on a daily basis, or multiple times a day, her answer was fine. And I'm like, you know what, if I hear one moe I'm fine out of you, I'm going to make some changes here, because you are not fine.
Alex Cullimore:
That's a great way of looking at it. And that's really important, just watching for the energy levels of other people. Again, you get to build that legacy together, not only the legacy of how you're going to make them feel and how they will remember you, but the legacy of whatever you're building together.
Cristina Amigoni:
I do have to plug in like one of my favorite superheroes pieces on legacy. Because it's just one of those things. One of my legacy is talking about superheroes. But when I think about somebody who's turned around their legacy in the superhero world, I think about Ironman and how he was the rich billionaire that built weapons at the beginning and only thought about himself and becoming rich and didn't really care about anybody else to the point where his heart is damaged. And so he goes through many movies, with people not believing he has a heart. And then, spoiler alert if you haven't seen Avengers endgame, we're gonna talk about that.
Alex Cullimore:
Oh, boy.
Cristina Amigoni:
It's been out for a couple of years. You know, but the you know, he's the goodbye to him when he dies and sacrifices himself to save the universe is really Like this one of his first Iron Man hearts with the words, they say, "Yhis is proof that Tony Stark had a heart." That's his legacy, how he turned it around.
Alex Cullimore:
That's a great one. And that's the other thing to remember is that it Nothing can has to be set in stone. I mean, for better or worse, you can have a really good legacy going and then do something to tarnish it, or vice versa, you can feel like you've been off on the wrong path for a long time. But there's chances to move towards the legacy you may either be proud of, or something that you want, that you feel like you haven't moved towards. And so much of that comes down to being able to connect with other people, because they can help you get to places that you want to get to and then you will be surrounded with people that you want to be around. And I can't imagine a better combination than those two things. Well, thank you guys so much for joining us on our conversation on legacy. Hopefully there's some insights to be shared with yourself and others on how we want to be remembered and how we can connect to our own values so that we are moving towards the legacy that we want to see the legacy we want to report into the world.
Cristina Amigoni:
Yes, thank you so much.
Alex Cullimore:
See you next time on Uncover The Human.
Cristina Amigoni:
Thank you for listening to Uncover the Human,a Siamo podcast.
Alex Cullimore:
Special thanks to our Podcast Operations Wizard Jake Lara and our score creator Rachel Sherwood.
Cristina Amigoni:
If you have enjoyed this episode, please share, review and subscribe. You can find our episodes wherever you listen to podcasts.
Alex Cullimore:
We would love to hear from you with feedback, topic ideas or questions. You can reach us at podcast@wearesiamo.com or on our websit wearesiamo.com, LinkedIn, Instagram or Facebook.
Cristina Amigoni:
Until next time, listen to yourself, listen to others and always Uncover The Human.
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