Senior Living Webcast Appearance
Host Briana LaChappelle interviews Jim Cosco about why seniors should tell their stories.
Guest Appearance on Premiere Episode of Webcast Series
Legacy Video Stories Founder Jim Cosco recently appeared on the premiere episode of “Family Ties,” a monthly webcast produced by the Arbors and The Ivy about senior living issues.
The replay can be watched below. The segment about legacy planning starts at 2:30.
Full segment transcript below:
Briana LaChappelle:
Hello everyone and welcome to Leaving Your Legacy and how to best tell your story. During this episode, we will explore the power of storytelling and the legacies that we leave behind. I'm Brianna, your host, and I'm just so excited to dive into this remarkable journey of Jim Costco, a media visionary. With nearly three decades of experience in this industry, as the founder of Tipping Point Labs, Jim has mastered the art of brean storytelling, collaborating with iconic names like Harvard University, Keurig, and five star senior living. His work has even made it on the screens of MTV, Fox News and The Today Show, capturing Moments with Legends such as Aerosmith and Lisa Gibbons. But Jim's passion goes beyond brands. He's also the founder of Legacy Video Stories, a heartfelt initiative born from Personal Experience. After losing his father, Jim dedicated himself to helping other families preserve their lives through telling their stories, filmed interviews and documentaries using top of the line equipment. He captures the essence of individuals ensuring their stories live on for future generations. Join us as we hear from Jim about the art of storytelling, the importance of legacy, and how we can all help our loved ones memories and keep them alive. Let's get started. Hi Jim, and welcome.
Jim Cosco:
Hey, Brianna. Thank you. Thank you for that introduction. That was a wonderful introduction. I am so glad to be here to talk about this subject. As you said, I'm super passionate about helping seniors tell their own stories and leaving their legacy for their children and for their grandchildren. It's such an important thing to do.
Briana LaChappelle:
Absolutely. And first and foremost, I just want to thank you for all of the meaningful work that you do and helping others tell their stories because it is so important, well beyond just looking at pictures essentially. So thank you again. I think I want to start off the conversation by asking you what made you start this? How did this idea come to fruition?
Jim Cosco:
This idea came about eight months ago as you touched on. I have been producing video for brands for 30 years now and basically doing brand storytelling, communicating to an audience what makes a brand like Harvard so special or what makes Keurig's Coffee so good, and you're basically telling a brand story there. I've been doing that for a long time and as a result of that and as a result of my work at Tipping Point Labs, Brianna, I own all sorts of equipment. I can edit video, I can shoot video. I own cinematic cameras and things like that. And when my dad turned, I think 75 years old, I said, Hey dad, I own all this gear and I do this for a living someday. I want to come to your house and I want to set it up and I want to interview you about your life. Find out how you met mom and hear the stories about your childhood. What do you think about that? Can we do that? And Brianna, if you knew my dad, he was a great storyteller. He was in sales his whole life. He was bigger than life personality and he was like, yeah, let's do that. That'd be a great thing to do. I'd love it that, and unfortunately as things happen, life kind of got in the way. You think you have all the time in the world and you procrastinate and you think you can do it next weekend, next year, and you know what? He passed away last year, last April, and I never got a chance to do it. And so I realized what a mistake that was. I had the wherewithal do it and I just didn't. And having lost him, I would love to have had that conversation with him again.
Actually, when he passed away, I really didn't think about it. The conversation I had with him when he turned 75 until last Christmas, and what happened last Christmas was during Covid, everybody was zooming and doing these Zoom calls. We couldn't see each other of course, and it was very difficult and my mom happened to turn 80 years old during Covid and for her 80th birthday when she turned 80, we set up, this is Your Life Zoom call where we had a call for about an hour and a half and at different stages of the call, different people from her life popped in, her high school friends, her cousins, her nieces and nephews, all different groups, and it was a great experience. It was super fun and it was Zoom. So we recorded it and last Christmas I passed it around to my brothers and sisters.
I was like, don't forget about this zoom call we did with mom. It was great. You guys will enjoy seeing it again. And the reaction I got from them was a little surprising. They were like, yeah, Jim, that was great. We loved the call. It was so fun to relive. But what really struck us was the five minutes while we were getting ready and dad was on camera trying to get mom ready and he was talking to us and joking and he was in a good mood and we saw Dad on film and it was so good to see Dad again. I was like, aha, now I remember that video I was supposed to make with him.
Seeing somebody on video, seeing their mannerisms and their laughs and their smiles and how they talk. It's so powerful. And that's when I was like, I should have done that. I'm going to start doing it now. So in January I put a website together, legacy video stories.com, and I did my first interview, my first legacy video with my mom. I didn't want her to pass away. I missed the opportunity. So I sat down with my mom, I did an interview with her. It was fantastic. I learned things all about her that I never would've known before if I hadn't asked. And that's the thing you have to ask. And so this kind of thing is something I think everybody should do. Once I did it with my mom, I started offering it to other people in my family and friends and I was like, and the reception was, yeah, we want to do that, that's great.
And I thought maybe I can make a business out of this. I have tipping point obviously to work with the brands, but now I can work with people and to be honest with you, how much more rewarding is to work with seniors and hear their stories. It's so much better and I'm so happy doing it, and my one message is whether you do it through video, which I love to do, it's great, or you do it some other way, you got to just do it. You got to start telling your story. You can't lose the opportunity If you're a senior, think about doing it and if you're an adult child, get your parents to do it because you'll never regret it ever.
Briana LaChappelle:
Absolutely. No, thank you so much for that, and it's such a special thing to be able to watch the videos and it's just a different perspective on life as you mentioned. I guess my next question for you would be, are there specific pieces of advice that you would provide for the children of aging parents and how they would go about getting this started or how would they convince their parent to participate in something like this?
Jim Cosco:
That's a great question. Some seniors are chatty. They love talking about themselves and some they're shy, they're introverts and they don't want to be bothered. You run into that a lot and you have to remind them that it's really a gift for the kids. You're doing dad, mom, you're doing this for me. You're doing this for your grandkids. We want to remember you. We want to know about our family history, we want to know about our past, and you have to get them on board thinking that you're doing that. They're doing you a favor, and it's really easy to convince some of that. It's easy to earnestly say that because they are, I mean, I don't know one person in my life that wouldn't want to hear how their parents met or wouldn't want to hear how their dad proposed to their mom or what, who their favorite uncle was. Just simple things like that all the way to dad. What's the one piece of advice you would give your grandkids? What's the once meaning of life for you? Who wouldn't want to know these things? So yeah, you really have to convince them that you're doing it. You're doing it for the family, and they might not want to, but it's not hard. It's easy. It's having a conversation, so make it as easy for them as you can and remind them that they're doing you a great favor to do this.
Briana LaChappelle:
And that's great. And I know with tech these days, there's so many different tools out there that folks would be able to utilize for something like this. Do you have any suggestions on what they could use to help with this process?
Jim Cosco:
Yeah, absolutely. So for video, I like video. Like I said, I like to see the person and hear their reactions and hear their laugh. Again, it's going to mean something one day. It's seeing it, but you don't have to do it on video, right? If you do want to do it on video, you can use a service like me. There's other people out there like me. You could do it over Zoom like we're doing now. Everybody has the ability to do that. I mean, we all have these in our pocket. We all have a cell phone, so you can do it that way too. Then my cell phone I think shoots in 4K resolution, so do it any way you can. Then there's other ways to do this, right? You don't have to do it with video. Scrapbooking is a wonderful way to do it.
My parents have shoe boxes full of loose pictures and things like that, and if you go through them on the back, a lot of times it says like, oh, Christmas 1966, but encourage them to sit down with them, make a project out of it, look at the picture, flip it over instead of just writing Christmas 1966, ask mom and dad what was celebrating holidays, what were Christmases like growing up? And fill that back of that picture with notes about what Christmas was like and what kind of meals they had, and did mom or dad make something special? What was their favorite present they ever got is ask questions about Christmas and write that down on each one of these cards. Don't just write a caption, fill it with notes. I think that's a great way to do it. Some people want to write an autobiography or a memoir, and I know seniors are like, oh, I'm doing that. I'm writing a memoir. And that's great. That's a really special person that can sit down and do that because trust me, I've tried to write a novel. It's a lot of work, and to sit down and write down your life story can be a daunting task for somebody who's not a professional writer, but that's one way to do it, and that's free if you hire me, not free, if you want to write a novel, totally free. So that's another way to do it too, and if somebody's interested in doing it that way, great. My dad, God bless him, was one of the cooks in the family. Every holiday he did the cooking, and so he has a lot of recipes and he had a clam recipe he made every Christmas and a family recipe book where we have my dad's recipe, his clam recipe. Now we make it over the holidays, but writing down what that recipe meant, a little narrative about it.
Jim Cosco:
If you get good cookbooks, these days aren't just the recipe in the picture. There's a story behind it, a narrative behind it. So storytelling is really important. There's services out there, they're my competitors, but go for it. Like StoryWorth, right? StoryWorth is a company out there that will send you a question every email you a question every month or every week or something like that, and you write that sparks, it's supposed to spark to write down, answer that question, and eventually you have a little book. Again, it's a lot of work. Writing something down can be a lot of work. Digital memory books@remember.com, you can do things like that. There's a little kit that I bring to senior living centers when I talk about this called a life story interview kit. It's a little deck of cards. You get it on Amazon, and they have questions that cover early life, middle life and late in life, and you could just sit around and have some wine with your dad and mom one day and go through those cards and they can tell you, and by the way, while they're telling you the answers to that record, it don't you, even if they don't know you're recording, it's do a video audio record, so you have that, and that's also a good way to work them up and get them thinking about their own life. Maybe someday they'll sit down on camera and do a full interview with you, which is great too.
Briana LaChappelle:
Yeah, that's great. Thank you so much for sharing those tools and tricks. You mentioned when you're out and about visiting senior centers and assisted living facilities and communities and just out and about with your clients, just hearing their legacies and their stories, do you find that when you do share the video footage with them, what is the reaction that you see that must be such a nice feeling for you?
Jim Cosco:
The reactions are wonderful. They say that they're sorry. They haven't done it sooner. They say, I never would've known these things if we didn't ask them. If you didn't ask them, they think it's a really special thing, and when I get those reactions, it really makes it worth it, and people find out I sit down and I do an interview for 60 to 90 minutes, whatever they can handle. A lot of seniors lose steam after that, but I ask them questions that at an everyday situation, the kids probably wouldn't ask them, they wouldn't think about it or they don't have time to do it, and they're amazed at the answers, even if there's little things, they're just amazed at the little things. And it's so important because think about when I was raised and when you were raised, my dad and my mom were so busy taking me to school, picking me up from baseball practice, driving me to the next thing, reading me a story, keeping me amused.
I never asked them anything about who their best friend was growing up or what their favorite movie was. I may have known a little bit of these things over the years, but you don't find these things out until you ask, and life is busy. We all have these distractions. Nobody's having these conversations. People aren't eating dinner together as a family and talking about, and if they are, they're talking about their day, their immediate day. They're not talking about what was nana like, what did grandpa do for a living? You just don't find these things out until you ask, and you're not in that position to do that on an everyday basis unless you really make a point of it to be honest with you. So make a point of it. Make a point of it.
Briana LaChappelle:
That's great. How does this affect memory care or what role can this have with memory care?
Jim Cosco:
So that's a great question. One of the big triggers of saying I should be doing a legacy video is when somebody is first diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's dementia, and when somebody is first diagnosed with that, if you catch it early enough, once you get your medical plan in place, and once you kind of deal with it emotionally and kind of plan your path going forward, it's a no-brainer to then sit down and do a legacy interview, a legacy video while you can remember these things. And I can't stress how important enough it is to make it a priority when that happens, and even when memory loss starts kicking in, a lot of times, as you know, you don't remember the recent things, but the deep past a lot of people do remember and having a conversation about childhood and their parents and the deep past might spark something, and you might get that moment where you are reliving things and they are remembering something. And so even if you're a little bit down that pathway, it's still something that you should think about doing and sitting down and having these conversations because it can spark something. It absolutely can. There'll be moments where you're seeing your mom and dad again and they're remembering something and they're telling you something, and what's better than that?
Briana LaChappelle:
Not much. And I think this is a great reminder for all of us to just take moments to ourselves sometimes and just be grateful for the busy lives that are swirling around us and just remind us to ask our parents about what it was like for them to go through this or some of those special memories that they would like to share with us and just asking questions. It's so important, and this is such a nice conversation to have with you and just to learn about all of the work that you're doing behind the scenes to help carry on traditions and generations and sharing all of these special moments with grandkids and children and so forth. So I appreciate it.
Jim Cosco:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, my message is you do it any way that's comfortable for you. People might not want to sit down in front of a video camera and have these lights in their face. I try to do it so it looks great, and I try to make the person look as best as possible, and it takes a lot of gear and equipment to do that, but you don't have to do that. You just have to do it a way that you makes it easy for yourself, and you're starting to think about, Hey, this might be a good thing to do. The biggest trap you're going to fall into is procrastination, just like I did. And it happens. I do this for a living and I procrastinate for five years until it was too late. So don't fall into that trap. If you think you want to do this by yourself and you want to do this with your parents, don't procrastinate. Do it. Make a plan to do it. I have a quote from Mark Twain. He says that the secret to getting ahead is getting started, and the secret to getting started is breaking complex, overwhelming tasks into small, manageable tasks, and starting with the first one. That's all you got to do. You're just going to start, but I do have a suggestion on how to start.
So Brianna, if I said, okay, start telling me about your life. What's your life story? It's kind of daunting, right? It's kind of overwhelming. Where do you start?
Briana LaChappelle:
What do people want to hear about, right? Yeah.
Jim Cosco:
So I think people want to hear a little bit of everything. We want to preserve the history of your family. We want to hear the facts. What was your apartment growing up? What was Christmases like when you were a kid or other holidays when you were a kid? What were your uncles? What were your grandparents like? If my mom didn't tell me about my great-grandfather, I wouldn't know anything about 'em. You have to ask these questions. So just the facts and start with the facts, because the facts are easy. So I always say, well, we're going to start simple, and then we're going to get more complex, because starting simple is easy and it's just as important. The facts of life, the facts of your family, the genealogy of your family, the family tree. These are things that everybody knows and they're important to know.
So start simple, get more complicated. So what's the earliest memory you have? Simple question. Maybe some people can answer it, maybe some people can't answer it, I don't know. But start simple or family holidays. What's the craziest thing you ever did? These are questions that if they don't have an answer, you can move on. But then you get into questions. Would you say you had a good life? What's the meaning of life? How do you want to be remembered? These are big questions that somebody has to warm up to and start thinking about, but they're important questions. They're the complex questions. So start simple, get complex over the course of that hour, hour and a half interview. And by the way, it's nice to want to write an autobiography. It's nice to want to make sure you record an interview that's five hours long or whatever, but just start, if it's an hour long, if it's an hour and a half long, well that's an hour or an hour and a half more than you ever would've had if you didn't start. So just get going and just start. And I think that's really an important thing.
Briana LaChappelle:
So no more procrastinating. I'm telling everyone, this is such an amazing thing that you're doing to continue on with the legacies and just hearing people tell their stories and interviewing them, it's just incredible, and it's just such a nice message to share out with everyone else. Just stop procrastinating. If you're thinking about doing something like this, just do it now before it's too late, like you said.
Jim Cosco:
Yeah, go to my website, legacy video stories.com. Sorry for the shameless plug, but on my blog, there's lots of ways, there's lots of suggestions on how you can get started. There's a list of, there's a post about other resources that aren't video there. There's a post about how to do video on your own, things you should think about. There's questions that you can start with boilerplate, 30 to 40 questions that you can start with, and you can mix and match them for your own family. But yeah, go, there's resources out there. Just do a little bit of research. It's not complicated really. I call these things, I call them the interview of a lifetime, sit down with me and do the interview of a lifetime what they are. And I encourage, when I get a client, I often do the interview, but I also say, Hey, if you want your, it's usually the adult children, but if you want to interview your dad or your mom yourself, or you want a grandkid to do the interview, by all means do it.
It ends up being a nice little moment, and they know their parent really well. And so for some people, it's a nice way to go that route. And I come and I do the edit, and I bring all the gear and I make sure it happens. And by the way, when you book me to come, I procrastinating, I'm showing up that day. It's getting done, Brianna, we shot video together. You book somebody in advance, they show up, it gets done. But yeah, if a grandchild wants to do it or one of the kids, it's a really special thing. And then sometimes you might not get the answers you want to get if you do it yourself. So you might want an outsider like me to do it. Maybe the parent's more willing to talk to somebody that they don't know directly, or maybe I just know how to push the buttons a little bit and get the answers that are more meaningful. So after a brief conversation that we just determine who should be doing the interview and can go either way.
Briana LaChappelle:
Yeah, there could be that emotional tie as well, just hearing about or resparking memories. But I want to thank you so much, Jim, for this conversation, and I'm so happy that we're able to share it out with others. Is there any other last pieces of information or tips or anything else you would like to share?
Jim Cosco:
I would like to mention that a lot of people think about their legacy as a money or a property that they're passing down. And that's not the only leaning of a legacy. If you look it up, legacy is to me, something given from the past, a story from the past. And so I do think that a lot of somebody's legacy can be a tangible thing too. It can be an item or an object, and if not an expensive object, a little object that has some sort of meaning behind it. And so I would encourage us to start telling stories about objects and things that have meaning. I'll give you a quick example. My dad and my mom sold the house that we grew up in Melrose, I don't know, two years or three years before he passed away. They packed everything up into the the moving van.
It was like a game of Tetris, the moving van, trying to fit everything in there. All my dads stopped, and I will say junk, he'll say it was great stuff, but stuff. And among that stuff was these copper pans my mom had hanging in the kitchen for the whole time I grew up this copper cookware set. And when they moved it to their new house, they didn't really have a place to put it. It was a modern house. They didn't really want to put it anywhere. And she begged all of her kids, anybody want the copper cookware? No, we don't. It's like, what are we going to use it for? She's like, well, this is my grandmother's copper cookware. Can somebody take it? And it's my grandmother's copper cookware. Nobody took it because nobody knew that growing up, we didn't have a connection to the copper cookware.
So if you want somebody to have a connection to things, start talking about it. Now. The one thing I took from my parents' house, the day they moved out was this key chain. It is a free key chain. They got from the Wakefield Savings Bank for opening some sort of family checking account when they moved there in 1973. And it has meaning to me because that key chain had a key to the back door of the house and was hung up in the garage and the garage was left to open every single day. Me or one of my brothers or sisters would come home from school. Both parents worked, grab that key out of the garage and come into the house. And so every day we touch that key. One of us did for 30 years, I don't know, 20, 30 years. And so I took that because it had meaning.
Now that's hanging in my house next to my other keys and my dog leash and things like that. And a couple of weeks after they moved out, my brothers and sisters came over to the house and they saw that key chain hanging up and they all wanted it. They're like, you took the backdoor key. I'm like, yeah, yeah. And they all wanted it. It's a worthless piece of plastic, but it has story behind it, memory behind it, and the legacy behind it. So start telling stories about things too, because they're going to be meaningful. And I have a lot of things from my dad that transmitted meaning to me too, because there was direct relation, direct storytelling. And so storytelling isn't just about one-on-one talking. It's about the things and the mythology around these things that we have. And it's all combined to make up a mosaic of who your family is, who your loved one was, and it's all important. So start having these conversations about everything, and I guess that's what I'd leave you with.
Briana LaChappelle:
That's wonderful. Who would know that? That key right there would have so much nostalgia behind it with everyone who touched it for all those years. You would never think of it in your day to day, but now you're telling the story with everyone and me and just remembering it as something of worse and just being so special, even though it was a free key chain. Right. That is such a special story, Jim. Thank you for sharing that. Thanks again, Jim. Be well. Bye.
