Living a Legacy: Empathy, Purpose, and Mindfulness with Kyle Gabhart

**Stephen Skasz** (0:00)
Let's get to them, let's go.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Skasz** (0:17)
So Kyle, you were on the list for the Tesla cyber truck there, and they said a couple of minor tweaks, white interior, the founder's badge, some merch, and small price increase, right? What was that?

**Kyle Gabhart** (0:31)
A slight price increase of $39,000.
That was on top of the normal inflationary hikes that had already occurred. I mean, you want an example of a company without empathy. I know you've been waiting four years and we've been promising this to you, and it's ready with just a few minor adjustments.

**Stephen Skasz** (0:51)
You're like, nope, and you settle for the small one behind you there with it.

**Kyle Gabhart** (0:54)
That's exactly right. I can control it, and it is electric though, it takes batteries.

**Tulio Siragusa** (0:59)
That's the one you can get for $39,000.

**Kyle Gabhart** (1:01)
That's correct.

**Stephen Skasz** (1:04)
Well, welcome back to the show, everyone. I'm your host, Stephen Skasz, joined by Mike Lusky and Tulio Siragusa. Today, we're excited to dive into a meaningful conversation about living a legacy through empathy, purpose, and mindfulness. Our guest is a leader dedicated to helping individuals and organizations build enduring legacies through intentional purpose-driven work. Mike, introduce Kyle to everyone.

**Mike Lusky** (1:31)
Yeah, absolutely, Stephen. Happy to because our guests, like you said, are in for a real treat this afternoon. Kyle Gabhart is a seasoned leader, mentor, speaker, and strategist with really a passion for guiding organizations to align their actions with their purpose, right, which is so key in, I think, an organization's development. His work with the Bluegrass Legacy Group focuses on creating sustainable impact by integrating empathy, purpose, and mindfulness into leadership practices. Kyle, it's a privilege to have you on the show with us today. Let's start off maybe with a little story, right? To get to the heart of your journey. What inspired you to dedicate your career to legacy building through empathy and purpose?

**Kyle Gabhart** (2:21)
Yeah, I love that question. Thanks so much for having me on, and thanks for the opportunity to share a little bit about my perspective. My father and my grandfather were both selfless leaders. My grandfather was part of that greatest generation. He was a sergeant in World War II, served in the Philippines, Bronze Star, Purple Heart, the whole nine yards. When he came back, he used the GI Bill to start a farm in rural Kentucky. Most people, they think GI Bill, they associate it with college, and for sure, that's the more common utilization of it. But post-World War II, it was a mechanism for being able to get low interest loans and restart our economy, and so he used it to start a farm. That's where my dad learned his old school values of hard work, discipline, treating people with respect, and they passed that legacy on to me. The legacy they gave me wasn't a giant pile of money, but instead it was values, and it was ideals, and it was about how you live and how you serve. And I saw my dad live that out so well throughout his life, in so many different capacities. He served in Vietnam. He served his community, his local church. He volunteered for 20 plus years as the director of a summer camp in Austin, Texas.
And so they're just the inspiration of what they started, the flame that they had lit. I didn't want to let it go out. And so I picked that torch up and run with it the best I know how.

**Stephen Skasz** (3:52)
Wow. Kyle, when we talk about legacy, it often conjures up images of kind of in results. But legacy is something we build on every day, right? How do you define living a legacy?

**Kyle Gabhart** (4:05)
Yeah, it's so true that there is that misinterpretation. So I'll tell you, I've had many opportunities in rooms as small as 20 people, as large as a few hundred. And I asked the question, what does a legacy mean? What does that term legacy mean to you? And when I ask audiences that the most common answer, if this was family feud, the number one answer on the board is a legacy is something you leave behind. And I get it, right? Like we're used to statues and we're used to dedicating wings of hospitals and libraries, and we think about money that gets inherited. And so we attach that concept legacy to something left behind. But it's problematic to exclude it to just that. Because if you're walking out the proverbial door and you toss that stack of possibly money, right? But also priorities and values and projects and passions, you toss that over your shoulder, then you hope that the next generation catches it. You hope that when they catch it, they have some notion of what they ought to do with it. And it's a real risk because they may misunderstand. They may not know how to hold and handle that legacy well. And so when you pivot to living a legacy rather than leaving it, then you have the opportunity to mentor and to guide and to ensure that that next generation understands what it means to carry that mission on and you have that opportunity to coach and facilitate and drive and really see the fruits of what you've invested in.