We find a similar incentive operating among people we interviewed for the Sage Leadership Project (Quehl and Bergquist, 2012). Sages often note that they are serving others and wish to preserve their heritage, community, or environment—in large part because of the generative work done by those who came before them and “paved the way” (via Generativity Two), or by simply demonstrating what it means to be a guardian of heritage, community, or environment. Gratitude, in other words, is expressed by many of our Sage leaders not with a “thank you letter” but with action that exemplifies and builds on work done earlier. We not only want to “outlive ourselves” through Generativity Three; we also wish to help a previous generation outlive themselves by sustaining their actions, outcomes, and legacy.
There is a second way in which we pay it forward. It is through a “regression” in the nature of work we do. Many of our Sage leaders have been in executive positions in corporations or government agencies. They are grateful for the status, influence and economic security afforded by their former position. In gratitude, they now wish to do something of a humbler nature. Emulating Greenleaf’s notion of “servant leader,” (Greenleaf, 1970) they want to adopt rescue dogs rather than rescue a failing division of their corporation.
They would rather clean-up the banks of a river than try to pass legislation that prevents the building of a dam on the river. They want to act in a small but tangible manner, accessing one of the other motives we have identified. As Pete Seeger noted in his work in preserving the Hudson River, it is often smart to “think globally, but act locally.” We pay back by paying forward in an immediate and specific manner. We care deeply by caring intensively and in a sustained manner for something that stands next to us. To borrow from a phrase used by ego psychologists, we “regress in the service of a specific cause.”
Outliving Ourselves: Obviously, the primarily way many of us “outlive” ourselves is by having children; they carry our genes and hopefully our values and aspirations. At the heart of Generativity One is a belief that our children (or projects) will outlive us and will enable us to envision a world that endures after our own death or retirement from a project. One of the reasons the death of a child is so profound is that it shatters our belief that our self will be sustained though our children. “We bury our spouses in the ground, but bury our children in our heart,” noted a Korean parent who had lost his child and was interviewed by one of our doctoral students many years ago. It is in our heart that the belief in some form of immortality, or life of self beyond death, resides.
There are other ways we can outlive ourselves. We leave a legacy through the work we have done in an organization or in our community; these are examples of Generativity Two and Four. We can also outlive ourselves by having a building named after us or doing such important work in our community that a plaque is erected in our honor. Most of us have neither the money to donate a building nor sufficient visibility to earn a plaque in the park. But we do have the capacity to work toward the preservation of a tradition or event of which we have been a part. We may be a veteran of the Korean War and participate in each year’s Memorial Day parade, wearing a cap that brightly displays the insignia of our unit. We may attend our college alumni reunion and find it is a wonderful place to celebrate our accomplishments as young men and women. As a coach might suggest: we honor ourselves as participants in these generative events.
Guardianship and Generativity: What if none of these five motivators is present in our life? We propose that guardianship without generativity will often lead to obstruction and even to violence. It certainly will lead to a stifling stagnation. We are either stuck in the past or have dismissed the past altogether. When we are stuck in the past, anything or anyone who is new seems to be threatening. As a professional coach, we need to be particularly attuned to potentially destructive perspectives and practices among our clients if they become stuck and stagnant.
