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Handcuffed To My Bed

by Walt | Mar 14, 2024 | Success | 0 Comments

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

by Walt | Mar 7, 2024 | Success | 3 Comments

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

by Walt | Feb 29, 2024 | Success | 2 Comments

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

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 times, it 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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All You Need To Do Is Stop

by Walt | Feb 22, 2024 | Success | 2 Comments

In life itself, there is a time to seek inner peace, a time to rid oneself of tension and anxiety. The moment comes when the striving must let up, when wisdom says, “Be quiet.” You’ll be surprised how the world keeps on revolving without your pushing it. And you’ll be surprised how much stronger you are the next time you decide to push.”

— John Gardner

I was moving forward at warp speed. As I do.

Then I stopped.

Not because I really wanted to. But because I had promised myself I would.

I returned once again last week to a remote retreat. To rest; to re-create; to renew. (I set as my intention to do this four times a year.)

Going off the grid can be tough duty for an achievement and adrenaline junkie like me.

But what I know for sure is that the stopping is essential to the going.

We – all of us – are bombarded by inputs, demands, and expectations. We’re inundated with voice mails and text messages, emails, and faxes. Everyone and everything competes for our attention. And with our “smart” phones, we’re always “on.”

One day melds into the next as we labor under our self-imposed illusions that if we can but accomplish just a little bit more, pack in just a little bit more, respond to just one more request, satisfy just one more client, cart the child just one more place, complete one more task, then we’ll be able to rest.

Culturally – and individually – we’re weary. At the end of the day, most of us feel worn pretty thin.

We forget how important – how essential – renewal is.

Rest days are a key component of high-altitude mountaineering. Recovery is a critical piece of athletic training.

Bears hibernate; trees go dormant. The natural world knows how to rest. The seasons have a rhythm to them. We not so much.

We keep on pushing on.

I finished on wonderful book while on retreat: Life Entrepreneurs by Christopher Gergen and Gregg Vanourek. It resonates so profoundly with the work I do: empowering extraordinary living. Its essential message: “We can fashion a life that is purposeful, self-directed, and aligned with who we truly are – providing us with opportunities for challenge, contribution, and fulfillment.” We get to design our lives. We get to choose.

It’s a hard-driving book filled with fascinating profiles of highly successful, remarkably creative leaders, innovators, and entrepreneurs. It explores all of the nuances of extraordinary lives. And it captures a core component of success, one overlooked by nearly all gurus, coaches, and achievement “experts:” the need to stop; to renew; to re-create.

Speed kills. “We ignore the basics of our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being at our own peril.” Make renewal “a cherished habit,” the authors say.

Not all of us need to go off the grid to a monastery for a week at a time (although I highly recommend it!). But there are practices and “habits” that you could explore that might allow for some breathing room. Here are some things that you might want to try:

Turn off your electronics for a day (or even just an hour!)
Explore a regular mediation practice
Take a yoga class
Do some aerobic exercise every day
Walk in the woods or along the shore
Avoid your email in-box in the morning
Work in block time to avoid the interruptions
Don’t multi-task (it doesn’t really work anyway)
Take regular vacations, long weekends, and mental health days
Learn to say ‘no’ more often

Even the smallest of self-care practices will make life sweeter.

The authors of Life Entrepreneurs remind us what John Muir once said: “I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.”

When you go in, you’ll find how much more there is of you to step out with – to share with the world.

All you need to do is stop.

Off The Tracks

by Walt | Feb 15, 2024 | Success | 0 Comments

This is the end of the line for most folks. This is where the cart goes off the track.

Despite the most heartfelt resolutions, despite whatever the best intentions might have been, most folks give up on their New Year’s promises to themselves… right about now.

Not because they didn’t mean what they said.

Not because they didn’t want to change… because they did.

Not because they don’t have dreams for a better life… because they do.

But because life gets in the way.

I know. I was a single dad for a dozen years raising three young boys. I would get up (too late) in the morning, run around getting dressed, getting the kids up, finding the lost socks, and the lost homework, making the lunches, packing the lunches, unpacking and re-packing the back-packs, running the kids to school, tearing off to my office, arriving (too) late to gather up my files, speeding off to court, tying my tie in the rearview mirror and balancing the coffee in my lap (and spilling it), getting the call from daycare to come back because the kid had a 103º fever or head lice or both, scheduling parent-teacher meetings in between client calls, rushing off to soccer practice, making dinner, mitigating the fights, helping with the homework, returning emails and phone calls, and falling into bed exhausted and depleted… only to wake up the next day and do it all over again.

I know.

But change can happen. (I know this too.) What you really, really want in your heart matters. Your hopes, dreams, and aspirations matter. They are the call of your Spirit, the Divine within you, to live your best life; to share those gifts that are yours and yours alone to share with the world in the most perfect way possible.

And it’s not too late. (It’s never too late.) Yes, January may be over. But the canvas of this New Year still awaits you.

Here’s what’s true: All you need to do is apply a very basic success principle, one of the easiest of all success principles. Take tiny, tiny steps.

At just 1 pound a week, you’ll still lose more than 40 pounds this year
At just 1 page a day, you’ll have well over 300 pages for your book
At just 1 watercolor a week, you could mount an entire show
One job application a day is 30 in a month
One extra sales conversation every single day might double your sales

Take that tiny step today. Just for today. And then do it again. And again the next day. Small steps magnified by time leading to magnificent results.

But today, just think about this day. And take just one tiny step forward.

Remember, races are run one stride at a time; businesses built one product at a time, one customer at a time, one sale at a time; mountains are climbed one step at a time; novels written one sentence at a time; symphonies written one measure at a time; and cathedrals built over generations one stone at a time.

Go back to the beginning of the year, and remember why it was that you wanted to set out on your path. Reclaim that grand vision of that perfect life that is yours.

In every moment of danger, there is also opportunity.

Opportunity still waits for you.

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If you’d like help getting your cart back on the track, email me: walt@walthampton.com