Walt Hampton, J.D.

Creating the Work & Life You LOVE

Finding What’s Next

by Walt | Oct 1, 2026 | Success | 0 Comments

Jacob has multiple advanced degrees. For the last 12 years, he’s led a large organization as its executive director.

And he’s been extraordinarily successful.

He’s built an amazing team. The organization has grown and thrived under his leadership. By every metric, and certainly by all outward appearances, Jacob has had a great run.

There’s just one problem.

He’s done.

Not burned out exactly. Not unhappy. He just knows he’s taken the organization about as far as he wants to take it. The work that once energized him doesn’t anymore.

He wants a new career.

But he has absolutely no idea what it should be.

I see this all the time in my coaching work. People arrive at my doorstep after 15 or 20 or 30 years of doing something they’ve become very good at. They know they want a change, sometimes desperately, but they can’t for the life of them figure out what comes next.

Part of the problem is that success has a way of narrowing our field of vision.

You’ve spent years becoming known for something. You have a title that carries weight. You’ve built a reputation and a network around the work you do. The money may have been pretty good too.

Eventually, all of that gets tangled up with identity.

I remember this from my years practicing law.

I’d walk into a networking event and inevitably someone would ask, “What do you do?”

“I’m a lawyer,” I’d say.

If I wanted to sound particularly impressive, I could upgrade that to: “I’m a trial lawyer.”

There was a lot packed into those few words. Education. Status. Expertise. Years of experience. And, whether I wanted to admit it or not, ego.

The trouble is, I wasn’t a lawyer.

I practiced law.

There’s an enormous difference.

When we identify too closely with a role, it becomes difficult to imagine ourselves outside it. We look at the future and think we have to find another box that somehow accommodates the person we’ve been.

But a career isn’t a box. And your job title has never captured the whole of you.

Over the years, you’ve acquired ways of thinking, solving problems and navigating difficult situations. You’ve learned things about people. You’ve discovered what you’re unusually good at, often without noticing because those abilities have become second nature.

None of that disappears when you leave your office and hand back the keys.

I wish I’d understood that sooner.

When I wanted to leave the practice of law, I could see everything I would be giving up. I wasn’t nearly as good at seeing what I could take with me.

Years later, when I became an executive coach, I discovered that much of what I’d learned as a lawyer came along for the ride. I knew how to listen carefully, I could hear what wasn’t being said; I knew how to get underneath a problem and ask questions that might reveal what was really going on.

And here’s the truth: My old career wasn’t wasted time. It had been preparing me for work I couldn’t yet see.

Which brings me back to Jacob.

He and I could have started by looking at job postings. We could have inventoried his credentials and searched for roles where an experienced executive director might fit.

Instead, I asked him a different question.

“What draws you here?” I said, putting my hand over my heart. “What tugs at your heart?”

Because I’ve come to believe that the heart often knows long before the résumé does.

Finding what’s next may require loosening your grip on the person you’ve worked so hard to become. Not abandoning that person. Just making room for someone else who has been quietly emerging along the way.

You may not know the title yet.

That’s OK.

Start with the tug.

Just Because You’re Good Doesn’t Mean You Should

by Walt | Sep 24, 2026 | Success | 0 Comments

I loved law school.

There was joy in the study, in the debates, in the intellectual challenge of taking a problem apart and looking at it from every angle. I loved the conversations with classmates and the chance to sit with difficult questions long enough to understand the nuance.

Then I became a lawyer, and almost immediately, I knew something was wrong.

The practice of law felt nothing like law school. There wasn’t much time to read and reflect or savor the complexity of an issue. There was work to get out the door, deadlines to meet, clients to serve, and hours to bill. (Two thousand of them a year!)

My life was measured in six-minute increments.

I was also a trial lawyer, which meant spending a huge amount of time in conflict. That’s how the adversarial system works, of course, but year after year the contentiousness wore me down.

The problem was that I was really at it. And it paid really well.

So even though I wanted out, leaving didn’t feel simple. I had kids, a house, tuition bills and responsibilities. A therapist I worked with at the time called them the golden handcuffs, and the phrase fit perfectly.

The career that was making me miserable was also providing the income, security and identity that made leaving feel almost impossible.

And there was another trap I couldn’t see as clearly then: I had invested years becoming good at this.

Law school. The bar. Long days and late nights. Years learning how to try cases, take depositions, write briefs, negotiate settlements and advise clients.

Walking away from all of that felt wasteful.

That is how a lot of people stay stuck.

We assume that because we’ve invested heavily in something, we need to keep investing in it. Economists call this the sunk cost fallacy. The money is already spent. The years are already gone. Yet we keep allowing those past investments to determine what we do next.

But wait, there’s more! There’s another assumption underneath that one that may be even more powerful.

If I’m good at something, surely I’m “supposed” to keep doing it.

But competence and fulfillment are not the same thing.

You can be very good at work that is slowly hollowing you out. You can keep earning more money and still become less happy with the life that money is supporting.

From the outside, everything might look amazing. But on the inside you’re miserable.

It took me far too long to understand that.

I stayed in the practice of law for more than two decades.

Years later, I became an executive coach, and I absolutely love the work I get to do.

I love the conversations and the chance to help people see what they cannot quite see for themselves. I love sitting with a complicated business or life problem long enough for something useful to emerge.

And much of what made me a good lawyer came with me.

The ability to listen carefully, spot patterns, think strategically, ask difficult questions and help someone make sense of a complicated situation did not disappear when I left the law.

I didn’t throw away those years. I simply started using what I had learned in a different way.

I wish I had understood that sooner.

We often imagine a career change as starting over, but that’s not always what ‘s happening. More often than we realize, we carry a great deal with us. The skills, judgment and experience travel even when the profession itself does not.

Here’s what’s true: There nay be something in your own life right now that you are extraordinarily good at. People may admire you for it. They may depend on you for it, and it may pay you very well. But it doesn’t make your heart sing.

That doesn’t make the years you invested meaningless, and it doesn’t mean you made some terrible mistake by staying as long as you did. It may simply mean that the work served you for a season, and that the life you really want right now requires something different.

Just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean you should spend the rest of your life doing it.

I help people find the work and the life they love. If you’re even just the tiniest bit curious, email me: [email protected]

How To Stand Out In The Age of AI

by Walt | Sep 17, 2026 | Success | 0 Comments

Ernst & Young is putting $100 million behind something that says a lot about where work is headed.

The firm is creating new incentives for employees who demonstrate what it calls more “human” skills, including adaptability, innovation and judgment. KPMG has been reworking training around critical thinking and judgment, while PwC is emphasizing empathy and creativity alongside AI skills.

This caught my attention because it runs against a lot of the anxiety surrounding artificial intelligence.

There’s been so much conversation about what AI will replace, which jobs will disappear, and which technical skills people need to acquire in order to stay relevant.

All of that matters for sure.

But I think there’s another question that may matter even more: What becomes more valuable when information becomes almost impossibly abundant?

For most of my professional life, knowledge carried a premium. Lawyers, physicians, accountants, consultants and other professionals spent years accumulating expertise. A lot of what clients paid for was access to information they didn’t have, along with someone who knew where to find the rest of it.

That advantage is disappearing quickly. We now carry access to more information than we could possibly absorb. AI can pull together research, summarize complicated material, identify patterns, draft a report and help us explore possible solutions in a fraction of the time those things once required.

And much of it is free.

That doesn’t make expertise irrelevant. Far from it. But it changes where the real value lies.

The important work increasingly comes after the information arrives.

Someone still has to decide what matters and what doesn’t. The answer that looks compelling on the screen may rest on a bad assumption. A recommendation can be technically sound and still make no sense given the realities of a particular business. The numbers may point one way while experience suggests there’s something important they aren’t capturing.

That’s critical thinking; that’s judgment.

It’s developed through experience, curiosity, mistakes and the willingness to think beyond the obvious answer. AI can inform that process and make it better. I use it that way every day.

But judgment can’t simply be outsourced.

Neither can understanding people.

You can walk into a meeting with impeccable data and completely miss what’s happening in the room. A client may ask one question when something very different is worrying them. An employee may say everything is fine when it clearly isn’t. Sometimes the most important thing a leader does is notice what hasn’t yet been put into words.

That ability becomes especially valuable when everyone has access to increasingly powerful tools.

I don’t think the lesson is to resist AI. Quite the opposite. Use it. Learn it. Let it take work off your plate that never required your highest abilities in the first place. Let it help you become faster and better informed.

But don’t mistake access to powerful technology for the thing that will distinguish you.

When anyone can generate the report, the value shifts toward knowing whether the report is any good.

When everybody can access the information, value comes from making sense of it in the context of a real problem.

And when technology makes more of our work efficient and automated, being able to connect deeply and genuinely with another human being becomes increasingly rare.

That, I suspect, is what EY and the other large professional firms are recognizing.

The future belongs neither to people who ignore AI nor to those who simply become good at prompting it.

It belongs to people who can use these extraordinary tools without surrendering the human capacities that make the tools useful in the first place.

In the age of artificial intelligence, standing out doesn’t mean becoming ever more technological.

It has everything to do with becoming more human.

Become A Control Freak

by Walt | Sep 10, 2026 | Success | 0 Comments

Ok people, it’s done.

Summer’s over. Labor Day is so last weekend.

The vacation’s behind you. No more lazy lunches. No more casual Fridays.

It’s time to put away the sandals and the swimmies. It’s time to get back to it.

Fall is here. Time to get busy; time to get serious.

No more leisure, no more playtime.

It’s time for work.

Uhhh, wait a minute: I object. I don’t want to give up playtime!

It is a busy time of year. But perhaps we can take some of summer with us?

In summer, it seems, time is more expansive; the rules more flexible; the boundaries softer.

And then September comes and – maybe it’s a holdover from going back to school – it seems like the time for fun is over.

We move back into our busy lives, our schedules chock full, shuttling around the kids, out to soccer games and swim practices, with evening meetings, volunteer activities and board commitments.

Many of my coaching clients feel like they’re moving back into the forest fire armed only with their squirt guns; their lives turned into an out-of-control carnival game of whack-a-mole. Reacting endlessly, and breathlessly, to the urgent.

Never really getting to what is really, truly the important in their lives.

And summer slips silently into the rearview mirror with perhaps some vague hope for respite and reprieve on some distant unencumbered weekend… or maybe in February on that “vacation.”

There is a different way.

But it requires that you become a control freak.

That’s right, a control freak: someone who takes control of their lives!

No one else is gonna do it for you. You’ve gotta do it for yourself.

And this means that you need a bit of courage and audacity.

I know. I live it too. Bombarded by unceasing demands and expectations in every area of our lives. Inundated by inputs. Juggling multiple modalities of communication. Over committed and suffused with the anxiety of dropping the ball.

But here’s the truth: the in-box will always be full. None of us will ever get it all done. If you died tomorrow, you’d be replaced.

So why not pay attention to what truly matters?

So here are some practices to consider before September gets too crazy:

Decide what really, really matters to you. Spend time on that. Get rid of the rest.
Get really good at saying no; if you find yourself saying you “should” do something, you probably shouldn’t.
Carve out time for yourself – every single day. No one else is going to do it for you.
Get up an hour earlier and enjoy the quiet. Use it to read and write and meditate and create.
Plan your weeks; and plan each day; actually schedule in the time for the things that matter most to you.
Turn off the TV at night and focus on the life you really want.

Here’s the scoop: at the end of our lives, no one is going to wish they spent more time in the office, billed more hours, sold more product, sat on more boards, went to more PTO meetings, or volunteered for more committees. It won’t matter whether you went to one more network group, whether your Facebook status was up to date, or whether you were well LinkedIn. What will matter will be the experiences you have had, the love you have shared, the lives you have touched.

What will matter will be whether you showed up in each and every moment to know the fullness and the joy of your life.

What will matter is whether you have lived without regret.

For that to happen, you’ll need to become a control freak.

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Ready for work that sets you free? Let’s talk! Email me: [email protected]

And stop by for a visit at: https://summit-success.com/

Get Some Help

by Walt | Sep 3, 2026 | Success | 2 Comments

It was late in his career.

He’d abandoned the whole idea of a 45- or 50-minute therapeutic hour. We’d have these marathon two-hour sessions.

I think about him all the time. Irv saw me through one of the darkest chapters of my life.

I’ve been with my coach, Tama, now for more than 16 years. She’s helped me see the path when I couldn’t see it myself.

I’ve been lucky to have found wise guides across the decades. And I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have co-created the amazing life I’m blessed to have without them.

Turns out, all those years of getting help may have been one of the smartest things I ever did.

Psychologist and MacArthur Fellow, Angela Duckworth, knows something about grit.

She’s spent much of her career studying perseverance, passion and what allows people to achieve difficult things over long periods of time.

So you might expect her to celebrate the lone striver. The fiercely independent person who keeps grinding until the problem finally yields.

She doesn’t.

In a recent piece in the The New York Times, Duckworth writes that every high performer she has studied credits other people with helping them succeed. She points to research showing that knowing when to ask for help is itself an important part of achievement.

That’s worth paying attention to if you’re an entrepreneur or business professional.

Most successful people I know are pretty fiercely independent. They’re resourceful. They’re accustomed to figuring things out and staying with hard things long after other people might have quit.

That quality probably helped make them successful.

It can also become a problem.

There comes a point when self-reliance starts narrowing your field of vision. You get locked inside your own thinking. Assumptions begin to look like facts. Old patterns become difficult to see simply because you’ve been living with them for so long.

Duckworth points to what psychologists call the “illusion of self-sufficiency.” We tend to underestimate how much of what we know, and how much of what we’ve accomplished, came to us through other people.

I’ve certainly found that to be true.

The value of a good coach isn’t that they have all the answers. I’d be suspicious of one who thought they did.

The real value is perspective.

When you’re living inside a problem, it can be remarkably difficult to see it clearly. Someone standing outside the frame can notice things you’ve stopped noticing. They can help you question what you’ve quietly come to accept as fixed.

Sometimes all it takes is seeing the problem differently. That can be enough to change what happens next.

And asking for that kind of help doesn’t make you less independent.

If anything, it’s an assertion of agency. You’re deciding that your current way of seeing things isn’t the only one available to you, and that pride isn’t a particularly good reason to stay stuck.

Duckworth also notes that entrepreneurs tend to do better when they’re connected with other people who can help them learn, think through problems and avoid bad decisions.

None of this means handing your life over to somebody else.

The responsibility remains yours.

But the mythology of the self-made person has done us no favors. Nobody gets very far entirely on their own.

Irv helped me when I was lost.

Tama has helped me see possibilities I couldn’t see by myself.

And looking back across the years, I can see how much of my life has been shaped by people who were willing to walk alongside me for part of the journey.

Getting help isn’t a failure of grit.

Often, it’s what grit actually looks like.