Do You Write Your Own Eulogy? 10 Coaching Practices to Try

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Do You Write Your Own Eulogy, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Practices that may help

1. Write your own eulogy first
   Draft what you want said about your character at your funeral — then measure the gap against your life now.
   The Eulogy Virtues: Building a Life of Character
2. The Eulogy Virtues: Building a Life of Character
   David Brooks distinguishes two sets of virtues: résumé virtues — the skills and achievements that get you hired — and eulogy virtues — the moral qualities like courage, honesty, and loyalty that people mention when you die. His argument is that modern culture relentlessly develops the first set while neglecting the second, and that deliberately cultivating character requires different work: self-examination, wrestling with weakness, and submission to commitments beyond self-interest.
3. The eulogy exercise: working backward from the life you want
   Write a brief eulogy for yourself that describes who you were and how you lived — then work backward to what that requires today.
   Values-Based Action (ACT), Made Practical
4. Use the eulogy / future-self lens
   Imagine how you’d want to be remembered to reveal the values you’d defend most.
   Values Clarification, Made Practical
5. Choose a character role model and study their biography
   Find a person — living or historical — whose eulogy virtues you admire and study how they built them.
   The Eulogy Virtues: Building a Life of Character
6. Write the passages about what you are genuinely proud of
   Acknowledge, without false modesty, the things you have done that were worth doing.
   The Legacy Letter: Writing What You Want to Leave Behind
7. The Legacy Letter: Writing What You Want to Leave Behind
   A legacy letter (also called an ethical will) is a written statement of the values, wisdom, and meaning you want to pass on — distinct from a legal will, which handles possessions. Rooted in the Viktor Frankl tradition of meaning-as-a-motivational-force, writing one clarifies what matters most and tends to align daily choices toward what you actually want to have stood for. The evidence is primarily clinical and observational, but the practice is well-established in end-of-life care and is increasingly used across adulthood.
8. Use the deathbed perspective to clarify what matters
   Imagine yourself at the end of your life looking back — and use that perspective to evaluate today’s choices.
   The Legacy Letter: Writing What You Want to Leave Behind
9. Write unsent letters for private emotional processing
   Write a gratitude letter with no intention of sending it — the writing itself is the practice.
   Gratitude Letters: Writing Your Way to Deeper Appreciation
10. Write a brief final accounting
    Write as if you’re reporting on your life: what did you do with your time?
    Memento Mori: Using Mortality Awareness to Focus What Matters

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• If someone stood up at my funeral tomorrow and told the truth about how I actually treat people, I’m not sure I’d like what they’d have to say→
• My days get eaten by what’s urgent and I never zoom out to ask who I actually want to have been→
• I can’t tell which of my values are truly mine and which I just absorbed from my parents or my culture→
• There’s a quality — real courage, say, or quiet generosity — that I admire deeply but have no idea how to actually grow in myself, and I want to find a real person who built it under pressure and trace how they did it, because right now it just feels like an abstract wish.→
• When I look back I default to everything I regret and fell short on, and the genuinely good and hard-won things I did barely register→

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