Legacy. It's a word I hear a lot in the childless community. What kind of legacy will I leave now that I'm not having kids? As though having kids is the only way to leave a legacy.
In this episode, I'll unpack:
To get Sheri's FREE guide to Create Your Best Life Even Without Kids, click here.
Where to Find Sheri
Instagram: @sherijohnsoncoaching
Website: sherijohnson.ca
Legacy. It's a word I hear a lot in the childless community. What kind of legacy will I leave now that I'm not having kids? As though having kids is the only way to leave a legacy.
In this episode, I'll unpack:
To get Sheri's FREE guide to Create Your Best Life Even Without Kids, click here.
Where to Find Sheri
Instagram: @sherijohnsoncoaching
Website: sherijohnson.ca
Legacy is something that I hear a lot of people without kids talk about, especially women. For some reason, there's this idea, this sentiment, that your children carry on your legacy, or maybe they even are your legacy. I myself have not felt the importance of this, and it really made me wonder why I was different. So I googled why do we feel a need to leave a legacy? And what I was trying to do was get at the psychology behind it. But the first bunch of hits were all about how important it is to leave a legacy and why we need to leave one behind, and that could be digging deeper and thinking more about this, and I'm going to unpack everything that I've learned and my theories on this myself on today's episode. So stay tuned, it might actually blow your mind.
Speaker 1:Hi, I'm Sherry Johnson, and you are about to discover how to embrace your life as a childless woman who wanted to have a family and never could. This is where we combine mindset shifting tools with practical tips so you can break free of outdated societal norms that condition us all to believe that women without kids just don't measure up to the moms. It's where we take action on processing grief and accelerating the healing journey, so you can feel free. When childless women awaken their self-worth, they transform from hopeless and inadequate to worthy, accepting and purposeful. Think of this podcast as your weekly dose of light bulb moments that will shift your perspective as a childless woman, about yourself, about your any power to change yourself, your future and maybe even the world we live in. If that's what you want, then keep on listening. Welcome to the Awakening Worth podcast. Welcome back if you've been listening before.
Speaker 1:I'm kind of excited to talk about this topic because it's something that I hear so much about and that is legacy. When you don't have kids, what is your legacy? And I hate even saying it in that way, because I don't think that kids are a legacy at all, but I think there's a lot of, I don't know. Society gives us this idea that if you don't have kids, then you don't have a legacy, or maybe you don't have someone to give you a legacy to, if you're using the definition of inheritance, but we typically don't. So let's actually define legacy before we dive in, because I think it's kind of it's important to get clear on what is meant by legacy. So I looked us up in the Miriam Webster dictionary and there were two definitions there One, a gift by will, especially of money or other personal property. So there's your inheritance piece. And the second one was something transmitted by or received from an ancestor or predecessor, or from the past, and this one gets a little closer to, I think, what we sort of think about as legacy when we talk about it in the childless, child-free community, and so that can be, you know, something that's passed along by. It could be anything really. I mean, the examples that they gave in the dictionary were the legacy of the ancient philosophers, and the war left a legacy of pain and suffering. So there's so many different ways that we use this. When I hear people talk about it, it's more of this latter definition that I think they're referring to, and for some I think it's important, for they feel it's important that someone carry on their name, or maybe a family, business, or maybe just simply to make a mark on the world or have someone to remember them. So here's an example.
Speaker 1:I've heard people talk about their funeral and how they envision that happening. How many people will show up to to pay tribute to me? What will they say about me after I'm gone? Who's going to remember me? What are they going to remember me for what is my eulogy going to look like? And if you're one of these people, there's there's no judgment in what I'm about to share. When I started to think about these, these definitions, I do remember a time when I also wondered these same things about my funeral, and I'm going to tell you what got me to change.
Speaker 1:So if you're a childless woman who has been feeling some hopelessness around well, what's my legacy now? Then you might be stuck in society's subconscious programming that tells you that leaving something behind is what makes you important, that who all remembers you and what do they say about you at your funeral? What are they going to remember you for? And this particular way of looking at legacy is created by the ego. It's the ego that tells you how you can be worthy in the world, and I see the ego because we all have one, and it's actually just your brain's way of keeping you safe. So maybe let's just, for now, drop all the negativity around that word ego and look at it as something that we can learn from. So, in this case, if legacy makes you feel important or significant, that makes your brain feel safe, it makes the people you feel you leave behind safe and it makes them a part of something, maybe a family, a business, whatever that is. So you know that you're stuck in your ego.
Speaker 1:If you are wondering what your legacy will be now that you don't have kids, that's your ego telling you that having kids and having someone to carry on your name or having someone to carry on your memory is that is ego. Maybe you're worried about becoming more and more irrelevant as you age. So there's another place that ego is coming into play. Or maybe you're feeling a lot of pressure to do something with your life, to have a big career or make some big impact on the world in some other way, and that can be ego driven as well. So what you might be doing in order to kind of try to fix this or try to feed that, is spending a lot of time at work, getting really busy, being valuable, making yourself valuable at work, or maybe it's volunteering or dedicating a bunch of time to a cause, finding significance that way. Or maybe you're someone who is kind of frantically creating whether that's art or songs or recipes or whatever that is more tangible things to leave behind, and I'm not saying that any of those things are necessarily bad, but they might still be leaving you with a feeling that you're missing something.
Speaker 1:So I want to sort of reframe legacy and there's a few things that I want to I'm hoping are going to shift your mindset. They really sort of shifted mine. So, first, letting go of the whole idea that a child and all that they will take on is a legacy, let's let that go so. Even so, let's look at it from a parent's perspective. If you're thinking that your child is going to be your legacy, so, for example, they're going to carry on your family business, or they're going to carry on your family name, or maybe it's your cause or a tradition or a culture or a language whatever you assume that your children are going to carry on for you, think of how much pressure that places on a child to do what they think their parents want, and maybe put yourself in the child's perspective.
Speaker 1:Were you someone who felt that way as a child that your parents assumed you were going to do certain things or take on certain things as they got older or after they're gone, that you're going to carry something on? So my dad actually did own a business. A little bit about how this comes together for me. My dad actually didn't want my sisters or I to take over his business because he never enjoyed it and he also had this idea that we weren't going to be good business people. But there were some ways in which we felt that me and my sisters felt that we were expected to carry on some sort of legacy. There was a big joke in our family about how my it wasn't a big joke, it was sort of a joke about how my dad was the only boy in his family and then he had three girls. So there was no one to carry on our particular name, my dad's last name, and then I also felt a lot of pressure to please him. So, for example, he went to one of the older, more prestigious universities in Canada and I felt as though I needed to follow in his footsteps. There was some pull for me to carry on that.
Speaker 1:We also have family heirlooms that I feel we need to accept and take on the preservation of those. So those are all ways. They're not huge things, but they're ways that this idea gets ingrained in our mind that we take on as children to carry on certain things in our family and then, when we don't have kids of our own, we think, well, who's going to carry that on my behalf? But all of those things you know how much of that is actually just parental expectations and not what you truly want, and does it really matter? You know you can't take heirlooms with you when you die. Most of the time you know you don't even have enough space as you downsize, as you get older, to bring them all with you. At the end of the day, it's just stuff and your children, if you had them, may not even find those things important or see the value in them. So it's unfair to expect children to take that on. So if you are someone who expected your children to take over business or expected them to take on your name, or even you know an inheritance, sometimes that's not actually what the child wants, because within that inheritance could also be debt or there could be something else that that comes up.
Speaker 1:Is anybody watching the? There's a series on Netflix, I think, or Amazon Prime, called Bear, and it's about a chef who takes over his brother's restaurant after he takes his own life, and this restaurant is not in good shape, and so there's a lot of anger and pain over taking over that business for the brother who's? Who's the inheritor? So just put some thought into that and the expectations that we set in the pressure that a child feels when they feel they need to take something on as legacy, when maybe they don't really even want to. So let's just let go of the idea that a child willingly and desires to take on your legacy, whatever you decide that is.
Speaker 1:Children themselves, by the way, are not a legacy. It's it's all those other things we just talked about and what you expect them to carry on. Now can we redefine legacy as impact? So this takes the ego out of legacy and and asks how do we want to leave the world? And can we leave the world in A tiny bit of a better place than we left it? And this view considers all children, not just our own. It's the world and how can we influence our little piece of it. So in this model or way of thinking about legacy, we can consider a legacy as every person we impact. It can be a stranger on the street, it can be your family, it can be your co-workers, it can be people. For me, you know, it could be just the people listening to this podcast.
Speaker 1:Our words have impact and it doesn't matter if it's a stranger or a close friend or a child or whomever, I am sure I'll ask you if you can think of a significant moment where a stranger said something either good or bad. Can you remember a time? I'm willing to bet, if you took a couple of minutes to think about that, you'd be able to recall a moment where a stranger said something that influenced you in a good way or a bad way, it doesn't really matter. If you can remember it, it had an impact. I can think of a bunch of things that have impacted me, and some in some really huge ways. Some of them gosh. My whole life has changed because of either a book I've read or even sometimes, just a quote on Instagram that shifts your mindset and you look at the world in a slightly different way. That is legacy. I also, you know, going back to the ego. I think about impact without credit. It's the ego that wants credit. It's the ego that wants your name on a building or on a person, a child. How can you make impact without taking any credit?
Speaker 1:The third thing that I want to talk about is what really made the difference for me, tying this all back to self-worth, as I always do on the Awakening Worth podcast. I really, you know, when I started to work on my self-worth, that was when things started to shift. I started to identify all the influences in my life my parents, school teachers, church, society in general and how each of these influencers has in some way taught me to measure my worth. Society, for example, led me to believe that the more money you have, the more valuable you are, and I think that's a pretty common belief in our society and it leads us to accumulate stuff by bigger houses, better cars, more clothes, because the more you have, the more valuable you think you are. So we're using that as a measuring stick. The amount of stuff you own and the quality of that stuff, or the you know, the value of your home, is a measure of how worthy you are. It's not, of course, that's what society will have us believe. So we've sort of been conditioned and it's why we keep building bigger houses and buying nicer cars and more clothes, more stuff.
Speaker 1:When I look at it from my parents' perspective and what I learned from them, what beliefs I gained from them, getting married, having children, that's what makes you worthy. Having a university degree for them from a good university was also something that would make me worthy. So we have many, many measuring sticks that we measure our worth against and really we have innate value. These are all just measuring sticks. We all have internal value, whether we get married or not, whether we have children or not, whether we have money or not. So, to give you a few more examples from church, it was giving is what makes you valuable. Charitable work I also got the. Getting married and having children makes you worthy from church. But being generous, giving, giving money, giving your time, doing that sort of charitable work was something that I learned from church and that made me fill my schedule with that kind of stuff giving, serving. And it's really when you let go of all of these measuring sticks and are still able to feel like you have value, as much value in the world as someone else, that's worthiness. And when you practice that the ego falls away. It's no longer important to do things because of what others might think and it no longer becomes important to be remembered.
Speaker 1:Legacy drops off this feeling of wanting to leave a legacy in the way that that we typically define it. That is legacy, purpose, future. These are all things that we cover inside my women of worth program because I see them as the things that people talk about. We all want purpose, we want fulfillment, we want and we want to leave a legacy. We want to make impact. We want to make an impact on the world.
Speaker 1:So I see all these words coming up so often in the community of women without kids, but in my experience of other things that are out there to help, no one has really gotten deep into the how to actually let go of the fears associated with not leaving a legacy, the fears that we associate with not finding purpose.
Speaker 1:So how do we actually address all of this and come up with your purpose, your joyful future, your impact? So by the end of my program you actually have a much clearer vision of how the fears are not leaving a legacy. Have on your, your purpose and your future and you'll have a clear vision of your purpose and your future. So that is opening up soon. In the meantime, you can get a taste of it by downloading my free guide. It's called create your best year, even without kids, and you can download it at sherryjohnsonca slash best year sherryjohnsonca slash best year and I'll drop that link into the show notes. So go download that free guide. Create your best year even without kids. I will be back next week with a guest episode, so come back and have a listen to that.