Walt Hampton, J.D.

Creating the Work & Life You LOVE

Listen To That Nagging

Listen To That Nagging

You’re not imagining it.

You’re not fabricating it.

It’s real.

That yearning.

That sense that there’s more.

More than you’re meant for.

More than you’re supposed to do.

More.

The more that will fulfill those deepest longings of your heart.

You’re not exactly sure what it is.

Yet.

It calls you.

Nags you even.

In the quiet of the day; in the darkness of the night.

It’s there.

Whispering.

You want the nagging to go away; you tell it to go away.

Because.

You’re successful.

You have everything.

You’ve made it.

You have more than enough.

You should be satisfied.

Grateful even.

And you are grateful.

But that voice.

Calling you.

To create anew. To begin again.

It won’t go away.

It will never go away.

Because it’s the Creator Spirit within you.

Listen.

Listen to those longings of your heart.

Listen and begin.

The Bears Are Up

The Bears Are Up

Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall you not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert. — Isaiah 43:19

The bears are waking up. That is what the local newspaper said.

I’m guessing that’s true. Spring has arrived here in the northern hemisphere.

Winter was a great season for us. But, for many, winter means hardship. Storms and brutal cold; grey skies, short days and long, dark nights; shoveling snow, icy roads, and heating bills that seem to never end.

Things tend to lay dormant in the winter. Many in the animal kingdom – like bears – hide out and hibernate.

In the people kingdom too.

Then the spring comes. New life, new energy, new hope. A reprieve; a new beginning.

And so it is in all our lives.

What we do in the springtime of our lives matters. How we till the soil; what we plant; where we plant it; how much we care.

What we build; how we build it.

The summer will surely come. And then the harvest time. It always does.

What we reap at harvest time will depend on these very moments in our lives: What we sow in the here and now will dictate the seasons yet to come.

  • In our businesses and careers;
  • In our networks and relationships;
  • In our marriages, partnerships, and families;
  • In our health and fitness;
  • In our financial lives;
  • In the service of others.

It’s easy to be complacent in the spring, what with the weight of winter finally lifted off. But spring is a time for focus; the time to re-charge, to re-double our efforts. The seeds that we plant, the investments that we make, the care and the attention that we bring to the spring in our lives will yield a thousandfold in the soft glow of our autumn time.

Of course, the seasons of our lives don’t always correspond with Mother Nature. I surely have experienced some desperate winters in the midst of spring; and brutal heat that killed the seeds long after harvest time had come.

But the spring of the year is a good time to remind ourselves of the never-ending rhythm of things; that even in the darkest of nights, the light will return. And that when it does, we have an opportunity to begin again; to create anew; to make our lives the masterpieces they’ve always been meant to be.

Jim Rohn said, “You cannot change the seasons; but you can change yourself.”

In every moment – in every spring – we get to choose.

Wherever you are, whatever the season for you, let’s begin again.

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When you’re ready to begin, and you’d like some help, let’s connect. Email me: walt@summit-success.com

Handcuffed To My Bed

Handcuffed To My Bed

Would that it were so!

That might have been interesting.

But alas… it was not my bed…

I was handcuffed to work that was sucking my soul.

I loved law school. The reading, the research, the classroom, the debates, the arguments. All of it.

But within months of graduating, I’d realized that being a trial lawyer was a terrible fit for me.

The constant combat; the unhappy combatants; the hermetically sealed office; the 70-hour weeks.

But I’d come out of school with a mound of debt. I had a big suburban house, a mortgage, 2.2 children, and a minivan.

I was really good at what I did, and I made a lot of money doing it.

I liked the money. (I needed the money.)

But my soul was being sucked away.

I was trapped. (Or so I thought.)

Golden handcuffs, the therapist said.

Kinda like trapping monkeys, I later discovered.

If you want to catch a monkey, you cut a hole in the top of a coconut, just large enough for a monkey to slip its hand into. You chain the coconut to the ground, and wait.

Along comes a hungry monkey. It slips its hand into the coconut and grabs the soft meat of the coconut. But, with its fist now closed, it can’t pull its hand out of the hole.

Boom, you have a monkey.

Which sounds pretty dumb on the monkey’s part, because all it needed to do was to open its clenched fist, let go of the meat, and run free.

But once a monkey grabs hold of something, it’s hard to let go.

So I held on, even though I knew that the job was slowly killing me.

Too many years went by.

I didn’t know then that when I finally found the courage to release my grip, and run free, that the work I would discover would provide joy beyond my wildest imagination. And a wonderful income too.

What are you grasping onto?

What would it be like to let go?

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I can help you escape soul-sucking work. Email me. We’ll set up a call: walt@walthampton.com

For The Sheer Love Of It

For The Sheer Love Of It

I was carried away by the sound. Beautiful beyond words. Beautiful beyond anything I had ever heard.

Each note, each passage, more glorious, more magnificent than the last.

A soaring concerto.

A virtuoso violinist.

I was the commencement speaker at a high school music academy. And this – this masterpiece – was the evening’s prelude… played by a graduating senior.

I leaned over in my chair on the stage and whispered to the assistant director sitting next to me. “What music school is he going to?”

She frowned and rolled her eyes. “He’s not. His parents want him to study economics.”

I was stunned. And sad.

What the world would never hear.

Even more, I knew how the story would unfold.

You see, many of my clients seek me out for new life chapters. Quite a few of them are in their 40’s, 50’s and 60s. They’ve gone to great colleges, graduating at the top of their classes. They’ve gone on to graduate school, business school, or professional school… and excelled. They’ve landed the plum job with a great salary… and a lot of prestige.

And years later, they’re miserable. They hate their lives. They don’t know how they got to where they are. They can’t figure out how to break free.

They don’t have a clue as to where they lost the path, where they lost their way.

For the young violinist, it was the moment he walked off the stage.

Because he had the wrong map from the get-go.

Dick Bolles, career guru and author of the ten million-copy bestseller What Color Is Your Parachute says that following your dreams still matters; love still matters; love of what you do.

Benjamin Bloom at the University of Chicago studied 120 athletes, artists, and scholars in order to determine the ingredients of greatness. He controlled for intelligence and family background and all sorts of variables… and what he discovered was that there was only one common denominator for greatness: extraordinary drive.

Extraordinary drive fueled by passion.

“A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself,” said Abraham Maslow.

I asked a coaching client today how he ended up a lawyer rather than pursuing the graduate studies in philosophy that he so loved.

“People told me that I needed to be realistic,” he said.

Too many parents, following a well-worn map and pressured by cultural expectations, push their young adults into a college paradigm that is economically broken, into hollow, empty fields that masquerade as ‘real’ jobs, only to end up seeing them unemployed, in debt and living in their basements. Or worse, to see them on my doorstep – after the years have dulled their eyes and sucked their souls – empty, sad and lifeless.

Despite our best intentions, it is a map that leads to nowhere good.

Those who read me often know that I am passionate about life-long learning and about life success.

But if you’re going to climb that ladder of success, you better make pretty damn sure it’s against the right wall.

And the only way to do that is to start from a place of love.

Deep love.

And, friends, it’s never too late to create a new map. One that’s really yours.

The Seasons of Things

The Seasons of Things

I love ice climbing on frozen waterfalls. Often you can hear the water rushing underneath.  You can almost sense the motion. It feels alive.

SharpEnd

But what happens when you can’t sense the motion?  What then?

I received an email from a coaching client late last week. She felt frustrated. She’d made a lot of progress in 2023; scored a lot of victories. Now, though, she said, she couldn’t see much forward progress. She felt like she’d lost momentum.

I wondered aloud whether it was just the season of things.

The late great thought leader Jim Rohn spoke of the seasons of change; the seasons of our lives that always come; those seasons that always repeat themselves. The rhythm of things.  The springtime of planting and new life; the summer of cultivation and care; the fall of reaping and the harvest; the winter of darkness, contemplating and planning.

The seasons of things. Interconnected. Locked in balance. Necessary one to the other.

I look outside my window at winter’s frozen landscape here in the northeast. There doesn’t seem to be much of anything going on. But I know on some particularly warm day, not many weeks from now, flowers will bolt from the ground. And spring will be here.

Not by accident. Not without the work of winter.

Spring doesn’t just happen.  Stuff’s going on in the ground even now.

Momentum.  Just unseen.

I asked my client whether she was continuing to do the work… attending to her daily practices; whether she was ‘showing up’ even though she didn’t ‘feel the love.’

“Of course,” she said. Which was the right answer. (At least as far as her coach was concerned.)

Because, as I’ve written many timesit is the showing up, even in the face of failure – and especially when we can’t see the progress – that matters most.

The small, tiny, incremental, perhaps imperceptible, steps over time. The ultra-marathon of life.

We might say we hate the winter. But the winter always comes.

And so the spring.

I told my client (and myself): Do the work. Keep at the work.

Hold fast the vision.

And trust more.

Just trust. In the rhythm of things.

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