There’s an old saying that goes, "If you don’t know where you’re going, any path will take you there." The same is true of personal development. Everyone who starts down the path of personal development wants to grow – to evolve into something more than when they began their journey. But figuring out just what path to take when you set out is a major challenge in and of itself.

As a holistic health practitioner, I'm a big fan of getting right to the heart of the matter. So the first thing I do when I meet with a new client who is ready to begin their quest for personal development is to ask them if they have a legacy.

What exactly does that mean?

Most of us have some sense of the meaning of the term "legacy." The common use of this word is backward looking.

Take this question: "What kind of legacy do you want to leave behind?" In this case, a legacy is something like the achievements we’re known for when we’re gone. But this backward looking sense of a legacy is just a small part of what I’m after when I talk to clients about their legacy. After all, we’re not planning for their funeral here!

The reason why I use the word "legacy" is that it focuses our attention on the whole picture and purpose of our lives. It’s fantastic to have career goals, financial goals or relationship goals, but often times we tend to ignore the other aspects of our lives in favor of pursuing those particular achievements. This imbalance inevitably slows down our growth and frequently results in all sorts of health problems.

True personal development requires a holistic approach, one in which you’ve set out the ideal picture of your life and developed a goal structure that supports that the achievement of that total life goal. Because a legacy just is your complete life’s goal, having one is a crucial step in taking a holistic approach to personal development.

So one fantastic benefit to having a legacy is that it can help you to create and organize goals. It provides you with the ideal towards which all your efforts in life are directed. But having a well thought-out legacy offers so much more. As with any other project, there will always be distractions while you are working on yourself. We have habits to overcome, patterns of procrastination, people who need our time and energy, and so forth. The power of a legacy is that it can provide a very powerful tool to conquer those habits, steer clear of the procrastination, and to meet the needs of those around us with out getting diverted.

In fact, the reason why these diversions can have such a pull on us is because we don’t have any particular force guiding us in a direction that we truly want to go. But when your day is built around your legacy, those distractions become impotent. The short term pleasures that procrastinating offers pale in comparison to the potential of your legacy and as long as you stick to your goals, you’re always one day closer to realizing that dream.

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