Walt Hampton, J.D.

Creating the Work & Life You LOVE

A Deadly Sin That May Be Good

by Walt | Mar 9, 2023 | Success | 0 Comments

I was miles into the race when she ran up behind me and matched my pace. I didn’t know her. But she clearly knew me.

“I loved your Facebook pictures from the Grand Canyon,” she said. “I envy your lifestyle.”

“Yeah, thanks, it’s pretty fine,” I gasped as I crested the hill.

She peeled off to the right.

If I hadn’t been hypoxic in the moment, I would have said more.

I would have said that envy is good.

Envy is a voicemail, a text message from your heart.

Envy tells you that there is something that is lacking, something that you want, something that your Spirit seeks, something that would bring you joy.

I would have said to her that you need to listen to your envy.

What’s it saying?

What’s not working? What needs to change? What needs to be subtracted? What needs to be added in?

What are the goals you are not attaining? What are the dreams you are not fulfilling?

Yeah, my lifestyle might be good. But what are you thirsting for? What is it that you want; that you really, really want?

Know your envy, befriend your envy, understand your envy. Deconstruct your envy. Hear its siren call.

And after you’ve snuggled with your envy for a bit, harness its energy.

Put it to work.

Too often envy can be turned inward; and become bitterness, resentment, victimhood.

Know that envy calls you higher.

Get clear. Take action. Grab hold of the life you want.

Envy is not a deadly sin. It is a gift.

Get busy. Use it.

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… and if you want help getting to that life you really want, then let’s talk. Email me at [email protected]

When The Shit Hits The Fan

by Walt | Mar 2, 2023 | Success | 1 Comment

It happens all time.

Things go wrong.

The car breaks down; the power fails; the basement floods.

Your key employee gets sick; the copier breaks; your computers are hacked.

What will you do?

Do you know?

Because here’s the truth: things will go wrong. The shit will hit the fan.

Finland has a government commission. Its job is to imagine everything that could go wrong. It meets once a month, and prepares for the imagined disaster: chemical spills; fuel shortages; power grid failures; natural disasters of all shapes and sizes.

A number of years ago, before 2019, the Finnish commission imagined a respiratory disease pandemic. Finland was ready for Covid.

Fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, and blizzards happen with some regularity. Yet many countries, communities, and businesses are blindsided. Again and again.

Ann and I are Wilderness First Responders. Every two years, we re-certify our training. Because when we’re out in the backcountry, deep in the wilderness, high on a mountain, the consequences of not knowing what to do when things go wrong are pretty significant.

We imagine scenarios, and talk through how we’ll handle them. We keep a robust med kit in our backpacks, and in the car.

In business, we know that the computers will go down, the internet will get wonky, that the websites will get corrupted, that the SaaS will go bump in the night.

Do we like it when it happens?

Of course not.

It may throw us off our game. But it doesn’t shock us.

Because we’ve got a plan; and a process.

Because shit happens.

What can you imagine might go wrong in your biz?

What can you do to get ready?

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Growing and scaling a business means creating systems and processes that not only will make your day-to-day life much easier, but also creating systems and processes that will allow you to be prepared for when things go wrong. We can help. We have an extraordinary team of businesses coaches. Email me: [email protected]

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

Run Your Biz Like Climbing Ice

by Walt | Feb 23, 2023 | Success | 1 Comment

I want you to think about running your business like you’d think about climbing a frozen waterfall.

It’s not likely the first analogy you’d jump to.

But stay with me here.

Ice climbing is cool. (Sorry, I couldn’t help it.)

Frozen waterfalls especially so.

But this activity, which is a particular passion of mine, tends to be fraught with pitfalls for the unwary: like falling ice, sharp axes (I put one through my lip once), pointy crampons, lacerations related to pointy crampons, frostbite and hypothermia.

Then there’s this thing called a single point of failure.

When you’re anchored into the ice, you want to be sure that you’re anchored by more than one ice screw. Because, if you’re anchored into the frozen waterfall by just one screw, and that screw fails, well, then you’re kinda screwed. If you catch my drift.

So the principle: Never, ever have a single point of failure in your system.

True in ice climbing.

True in business too.

It was a beautiful summer day. (Not ice climbing season.) I was in a beautiful, boutique hotel, on a main thoroughfare, in a well-traveled resort town, broadcasting a webinar to an audience of about 600.

Suddenly the internet dropped out. And the power.

A construction crew out front, doing sidewalk work, accidentally cut the power main.

Luckily, I had a back up roaming router, and a power pack. Voila, back online.

Now we travel with the roaming router, a satellite router, a power pack and a solar panel.

Because our business depends on it.

Across our business, we are constantly assessing for and protecting against single points of failure: in team, tech, communication, systems, and processes.

My invitation to you: Where are you vulnerable in your business? Where are you dependent on a single person or system or piece of technology? What backup can you create? What can you do right now to protect against that point of failure?

Single points of failure can be fatal in climbing.

They certainly can leave you battered and bruised in biz.

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Want help growing and scaling your business? We have an extraordinary team of coaches. Email me for a no-obligation convo: [email protected]

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

Out Of Prison Finally

by Walt | Feb 16, 2023 | Success | 0 Comments

I’m free.

Finally free of the prison called my inbox.

We get hundreds of emails every day.

I only see a handful of them.

Talk about time freedom!

But even more than that, there’s a psychological freedom; and a sense of spaciousness and ease.

You can have that too.

Most entrepreneurs and business professionals get a lot of emails.

Here’s what most do: They dive into their inboxes first thing in the morning.

That’s bad.

Because your email inbox is some else’s agenda for your day.

If you’ve planned out your day, if you know what you value most, and if you know what your highest priorities are, your email inbox can easily hijack your day.

If you use your inbox to drive your day, you’re in even worse shape. You move in and out of email all day long. You feel like a little silver ball in a pinball machine. You end up exhausted, depleted, and wrung out.

I’ll use my very best Bob Newhart coaching: Stop it!

Some Basics

Let me share some tips and tricks.

First, get your email inbox to zero.

I worked with the CEO of a large music company who admitted to having 3300 emails in his inbox. That energy suck is dangerous. It’s like leaving the dome light on in your car on a cold winter night. Your battery just drains away.

Here’s a hack for getting to inbox zero right now: Declare amnesty. Create a email folder called Email Amnesty. Move your entire inbox there. Voila. You have fresh start with an empty inbox.

Now, second, with your new empty email inbox, commit to checking email no more than 3x a day. For example, create a block of time from 9am to 9:45am; another block of time from 1 to 1:30pm; and a final block from 4:15 to 5pm. (Committed block time is one of the most efficient ways to work on any task, especially email.)

Third, when you go into your inbox in your designated blocks, practice the 3 Ds: Do; Delegate; Delete.

Do means do what the email asks you do (like respond).
Delegate means forwarding on the email to your assistant, colleague or associate to do.
Delete means delete from your inbox (or in the alternative, moving the email into a client or customer folder).

Your inbox is back to zero!

The Advanced Practitioner

Once you have these practices down, I have some graduate level strategies that will open up the prison gates for good.

Get an assistant who’s job it is to review your email for you. (Yes, I know, sacrilege, especially for you lawyers reading this. No one can do it like you can. Except that you can create really clear protocols or standard operating procedures that your assistant can follow.)
Have your assistant Do, Delegate or Delete following the protocols you establish.
Have your assistant create a label for the emails that they want you to see. Then when you go into your inbox, you’re just looking at the labeled emails.
Better yet, create a dedicated private email just for you; not available to the public. (I have two of these. One I share just with my closet friends; one I share only with my Inner Circle Coaching Clients.) Have your assistant forward emails that you need to see to your private box. This is where the magic is. Because now you’re just looking at a handful of emails from people you actually want or need to respond to!
Once you’ve got an assistant trained on your email protocols, and once you have your own private email inbox(es), commit to staying out of the general email inbox. (This will be hard at first because you’ve gotten some good dopamine hits from all of that email chaos. But, you’ll soon discover a whole new sense of freedom.

Email is one of the single biggest time sucks for nearly every entrepreneur and business professional I work with. It dramatically reduces your productivity and performance and causes nearly unceasing stress and ovewhelm.

I did many years of hard time in email prison. You don’t need to.

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Want help growing and scaling your biz? Let’s connect for a no-obligation call. Email me: [email protected]

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

When You Want More Than Average

by Walt | Feb 9, 2023 | Success | 0 Comments

We do it three times this year.

Travel across the country to spend three days with our mastermind community.

It’s a gathering of entrepreneurs from all around the world. Colleagues filled with passion; and driven by a sense of mission. Passionate like-minded comrades who want to create amazing businesses, who want to make an impact in the world.

Days of collaboration and creativity. Days of inspiration, learning and connection.

Here’s what is true: You are the average of the 5 people you hang out with most. Average in terms of what you want, where you live, what you earn, what you drive, and what’s in our bank account. Average.

There’s nothing wrong with average.

But, if you thirst for more, you need to surround yourself with others who also want more. You need to seek out new relationships and new communities so that you can be nourished and uplifted, supported and encouraged.

Entrepreneurship can be a lonely path. It’s easy to get isolated. It’s easy to get brought down by the naysayers. It’s easy to get discouraged and despondent when you don’t see the results you want.

And so it is essential to seek out others who are on the path; to find your people; to surround yourself with those who believe what you believe, who want what you want. To be cared for by those who have your back, who want for your success. To drink at the well of inspiration.

Napoleon Hill first coined the term Mastermind. He saw that, “Two or more people actively engaged in the pursuit of a definite purpose with a positive mental attitude, constitute an unbeatable force.”

Unbeatable, and unstoppable.

At Summit, we’re driven to help others create lives that are rich and full and deeply satisfying; and we’re on a mission to help others share their unique gifts in in a big, big way.

So we regularly we travel far and wide to be with those who do the work we do, and want to make a difference in the world.

We need that support. You do too.

Because with BFFs, anything is possible.

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If tired of the naysayers, if you want to be with others who believe in you and want for your success, if you want world-class training and support, join us in our members only community HERE.