Eulogy Values, Endearment and the Gift of Deep Insights
What do they say about you? How are you going to be remembered?
I was once taught that the core elements of a brand are the answers to who you are, what you do and why it matters.
Yet, I was told, what's most important is what others say about your brand, not just what you think about it.
Endearment is how others experience your brand, how they feel about it - and what they tell others. It requires the answer to an additional question: Why do they love you?
For over 35 years, I've assisted senior executives in the development of their Leadership Performance Strategies, their Resonance Platforms and their Legacy Planning. Some of the valuable tools I've used involve the analysis of key leadership factors, such as their lifeline, personal values, unique ability, purpose statement and even their tombstone statement.
In his essay and TED Talk "Resume Values vs. Eulogy Values," The New York Times op-ed writer David Brooks explores the contrast between two sets of personal values:
Résumé values are the skills, achievements, and accomplishments you list on your CV—what you bring to the marketplace.
Eulogy values are the qualities people remember about you after you're gone—kindness, bravery, honesty, faithfulness, love.
Brooks argues that modern society often emphasizes résumé values, but true fulfillment comes from cultivating eulogy values. He calls for a deeper moral and spiritual development, urging individuals to build character, confront inner weaknesses, and live with humility and purpose. His essay challenges readers to shift from a life of self-promotion to one of self-confrontation and meaningful connection.
I've always focused on exploring both sets of values in equal measure with my clients. However, Eulogy Values have an intrinsic power deeply connected to Breakthrough insights that inevitably lead to personal growth.
Although my clients are initially attracted by the perspective of living as Peak Performers, it's the profound exploration of Eulogy Values that allows them to recognize how achievement, fulfillment, significance and legacy are interwoven - and how they expand.
Recently, I was interviewed in the "Anything But Typical" podcast by Gary Frey and Ben McDonald, and their first question was about "what others would say about me" if I could overhear them. My answer was "He sees beyond." And our hour-long conversation took off from there. This is just an example of a basic exercise in perspective-shifting that can trigger a deeper exploration.
One way to investigate Eulogy Values is to request that my clients become interviewers and go ask their most trusted contacts specific (and somehow uneasy) questions such as:
What's my Unique Ability? (based on Dan Sullivan's exercise in The Strategic Coach)
How do I add New Value to you and others?
What's my most significant Contribution to those whom I serve?
Who benefits because I succeed?
What do I fiercely defend? What do I doggedly champion?
What would not be left undone before I die?
What will you say at my Eulogy? How will I be remembered by those I supported?
As daunting as it might seem, the results of the exploration provide extraordinary insights. They are also rewarding and lead to profound conversations about what is, what can be, what could be and what shall be.
That's where my role as Leadership Performance and Resonance Strategist shifts gears to a higher level, so we can extract the gold out of the insights and transform your life.
Living My Eulogy Values
Below, you can find the compilation of several decades of direct feedback offered by former clients and close friends, organized poetically, as a way to encourage you to conduct the Eulogy Values exercises with those whom you trust most.
I treasure these statements, as they remind me who I am, what I do, for whom, and why it matters. They are living evidence of how I contribute to consistently evoke endearment.
You Walk the Questions (Carlos Salum)
Carlos, you are a Breakthrough seeker of deep seeing, living between worlds where wisdom isn't taught but invited to appear, one courageous conversation at a time.
You walk not on paths but in questions— open, unfinished, shimmering with the light of what might yet become.
You do not chase answers. You carve silence into speech, and stillness into strategy. Your voice carries the sound of turning— of leaders remembering they are human before they reach for the heroic.
You live in the edge-places: where mind meets body, where performance meets presence, where legacy meets laughter, and where the future asks: “What will you resonate into being?”
You do not watch from the shore. You dive— into fog, into fire, into the rhythm of becoming. You pull form from the formless, focus from the frantic.
You are the architect of thresholds. You guide others not merely to succeed but to awaken— to that still, central place where ambition bows to clarity, and leadership becomes a gift, not a grasp.
You sit with resilience long enough to know it is not steel, but breath. Not toughness, but tenderness carried forward.
Your questions break people open. You are a jazzman of insight, a sculptor of presence, a quiet rebel for resonance in a world of noise.
And still— you love. You dare to love this human work, this messy, brilliant unfolding of lives and longing.
You walk not toward the known, but toward the ember inside the question, where few dare sit, and fewer remain long enough to let the silence carve them open.
You are born of fierce kindness— the kind that watches a storm and sees only the seeds it will scatter.
You do not wait for the world to prove its worth. You watch, until it asks you what it could become beneath the weight of your gaze.
Your life spirals— not in a straight line, but as a widening arc through boardrooms, conferences, and screens— a whisper transformed into rising athletes, a young woman basking in tennis stardom, a brave pen striking truth on the page, an actor giving voice to a martyr, a leader echoing around the world— each touched by something you imagined before the world thought to ask for it.
You do not speak of resilience alone. You house it— in the high towers of ambition, in the aching joints of champions, in the curious minds of the young— so they may win and lose without losing themselves.
You know the sound of legacy is not thunder, but the soft percussion of hearts transformed by the persistence of your belief, enchanted by the song of breakthrough.
This is your mastery: to see both the flicker and the fire, to hold the hands of those still forming their idea of courage, and to name it— not as strength, but as surrender to something larger than the self yet never far from it.
Even now— as others rise— they do not quote your words. They walk inside them. They do not point to what you built. They live from what you stirred.
Your life is not a monument, but a way.
And somewhere, a soul just beginning feels the echo of your purpose and steps forward, unafraid to imagine again.
Thank you for reading this article. Take a shot at the questions. Share it with anyone who might benefit from a spark of insight and encouragement to design their Breakthrough.
[Previously published on LinkedIn in “The Glass is Full and a Half” newsletter on June 10, 2025]