What You Are Looking for Is Already Within You
Legacy, Leadership, and the Quiet Turning Points in Our Lives
There is a moment in Michiko Aoyama’s novel What You Are Looking for Is in the Library when you realise that the library is not really about books at all. It is about permission.
Permission to pause.
Permission to wonder.
Permission to become someone slightly different from the person who walked through the door.
I often think about that when I sit with leaders who are standing at the edge of a transition. They don’t always arrive saying, “I’m thinking about my legacy” or “I’m ready for my next chapter.” More often, they arrive with a restlessness they can’t quite name — a sense that something that once fit them perfectly no longer does.
The Library as a Threshold Space
In Aoyama’s story, the librarian doesn’t offer answers. She offers a book, always a surprising one, that reflects something back to the reader. What changes people is not the recommendation itself, but the moment of recognition:
This is me. This is what I’ve been circling around without words.
That is the moment I recognise in my work as The Legacy Coach.
So much of leadership particularly in public service is about motion. Decisions, strategies, crises, meetings, reforms, restructures. The world rewards those who keep moving.
But legacy is not formed in motion alone.
It is formed in reflection.
Coaching becomes a threshold space . It’s a quiet in-between where leaders step out of the noise long enough to listen to what is emerging within them.
When the Role Falls Away
The people I work with are often directors, heads of service, and senior leaders who have spent decades carrying responsibility for others. Their identity is deeply woven into what they do.
And yet, as retirement, reorganisation, or reinvention approaches, a quieter question begins to surface:
Who am I, when the role falls away?
This is not a question of loss. It is a question of expansion.
Like the visitors to Aoyama’s library, leaders begin to see themselves beyond a single title or chapter. They begin to recognise that their story is larger than the role they currently inhabit.
Reading the Story Already Written
What we do in coaching is not rush to write the next chapter.
First, we read the one that already exists.
We notice the invisible chapters:
The people who grew because of their leadership
The confidence they gave to others without realising
The standards they set quietly and upheld consistently
The courage it took to stay or the courage it took to leave
Like the books in the library, legacy is often hiding in plain sight.
One of the most powerful moments in my work is when someone realises that their impact has never been confined to their job description. Their true contribution lives in conversations, in culture, and in the lives of the people they have influenced.
The Quiet Shift That Changes Everything
Aoyama’s characters don’t leave the library with a five-year plan.
They leave with a subtle shift in how they see themselves.
That feels deeply familiar.
The next chapter of a life or career rarely begins with certainty. It begins with recognition:
Recognition of what has mattered
Recognition of what still matters
Recognition that you are more than the role you have played
This is a quieter kind of leadership. Leadership that steps back rather than forward, listens rather than directs, and asks rather than answers.
An Invitation to Pause
Perhaps this is the true parallel between a small library in a novel and a coaching conversation in the real world.
Both offer a space where the noise fades.
Both invite people to hear themselves think.
Both create the conditions for something honest to emerge.
In the end, what many leaders are looking for is not in the next promotion, the next project, or the next plan.
It is in the story they have already lived, waiting, like a well-worn book on a shelf, to be picked up and read with new eyes.