THE IMPERFECT SHOW NOTES

To help make this podcast more accessible to those who are hearing impaired or those who like to read rather than listen to podcasts, here are our show notes.

These show notes come via the Otter.ai service. The transcription is imperfect. But hopefully, it’s close enough – even with the errors – to give those who aren’t able or inclined to learn from audio interviews a way to participate.

Walt Hampton  00:00

For me, and is smart and sassy, driven and and for me, the beautiful Cinderella, all of it, I sat there in that first meeting thinking, no, no, this can’t possibly be true. And so coffee at Starbucks led to several long runs in the woods, to a few early mountains, to being on Kilimanjaro, and just the grand adventure unfolded. So it was kept me curious. Was Wow, really, this exists out there.

Achim Nowak  00:32

Welcome to the My Fourth Act podcast. I’m your host, Achim Nowak, and I have conversations with exceptional humans who have created bold and unexpected lives. If you like what you hear, please subscribe on any major podcast platform so you won’t miss a single one of my inspiring guests, and please consider posting an appreciative review. Let’s get started. You I am absolutely delighted to welcome Ann Sheybani and Walt Hampton to the My Fourth Act podcast. Ann and Walt are two smart, funny, opinionated individuals who are also married to each other. Ann Shabani is a Harvard trained author, book coach and the owner of Summit press publishing. Walt Hampton is a lawyer turned executive coach, Best Selling Author, spiritual leader and the founder of Summit success International. Hello, you two.

Walt Hampton  01:42

Hello, Achim. What a treat to be with you. Thank you for having us. It’s a

Achim Nowak  01:46

treat for me, and I always feel like I have to make a disclaimer, I have met Walt and Anne in person. I adore you two. As you know, I think we’re in for a juicy and interesting conversation, but where I want to start, because I really don’t know the answer to this. I think I know a little bit from Walt, but not from you Anne. So maybe let’s start with Walt. And I go to Anne when you are growing up, you know, teenager or a young child, and you know, you’re thinking about, Gosh, what do I want to do with my life? And you know how mom and dad asked you to think about that, what was on your mind.

Walt Hampton  02:21

So I had a mom who told me that I could do anything, and I didn’t really understand that there was a caveat that I could do anything, everything, but not all at once, but her, her presumption as a devout Irish Catholic mother was that her oldest son, I’m the oldest of seven, would become a priest, and I dutifully went to the seminary, and so early on, that was my course. But I also had a dad who had an adventuresome spark to him, and he and I learned to climb mountains together when I was just 10 years old, and so that thread was very strong as well in those years.

Achim Nowak  03:08

Well, I can’t wait to talk about the present, because I think those threads were appearing in your present life.

Ann Sheybani  03:14

And yeah, I was listening to what, how Walt phrased, what he was going to be. And we had very different parents, because I remember my mother telling me, you can just be a B student like you don’t have to reach you don’t have to try really, really hard. You just like be a B student and find something that you like doing. And the flip side of that is you need to have a college degree, because I don’t want you to get stuck. And she was very much stuck in her marriage to my father, and the conversation became, you know, maybe not a doctor. You in that era, I was born in 63 in that era, you maybe you’ll be a teacher. Maybe you’ll be a nurse. And the first time I’m in grade school, the only thing I think of is I want to be Cinderella, because I, like, I got a hold of a book, and Cinderella had this amazing dress, she had these great shoes. And I thought, yeah, maybe I’ll be an actress. And my parents immediately put the kibosh on that. You should be an engineer. You should get into the sciences. That’s how you’re going to make money, which is where I ended up going as a college student, I had actually wanted to be other than Cinderella. I wanted to study Vietnamese at Ann Arbor, and my father had looked at me like, why would I pay for you to get a degree in Vietnamese? So I I became a chemist instead, but I knew early on one of those kind of weird twists that I loved writing. And I had this fantasy in high school that I would write for Saturday Night Live and live in New York City. And the fantasy lasted. 10 seconds, and then, you know, reality took over thanks to my the help of my parents, and I got a job in chemistry. I have

Achim Nowak  05:09

about 10 questions just based on what you said, but I want to go with one. Why Vietnamese

Ann Sheybani  05:19

Achim, we don’t have three hours, but really early on, and I would say, around the age of 13, I got fascinated with the Vietnam War. I like I just started reading everything there was to be read on the Vietnam War. And I remember being fascinated by the politics of it, by the culture of it. And I was speaking to the Minister of my mother’s church, who had just come back from Vietnam, and he was talking about how beautiful the language was and the culture. And it captured my imagination. I thought it would be so fabulous to understand the language. And he said, Well, if you want to learn the language, there’s a lot of Vietnamese refugees here, and if you tutor them in English, they would teach you Vietnamese. And he gave me the name of a Vietnamese nun in Hartford, Connecticut. I called her up because that’s what a 13 year old does. You just pick up the phone and you call the nun, and she hooked me up with a group of very, very culture shocked Vietnamese refugees, and I started learning, and that led to a romance, and that led to singing in a Vietnamese band. And it just, I thought it made me incredibly unique. I just thought that that is what would set me apart from the average bear.

Achim Nowak  06:49

I do think that would make you extremely unique. Your self assessment was right on. I’m going to jump ahead, because I want to start with your relationship, because I’m interested in your professional, personal relationship and journey. You both met after having been married to other people. I believe you two met online. We don’t have to go into all the details, but what I’m most interested in if, and I love to hear from each of you, like, what did you learn from your first marriage when you went like, I don’t want to do that again.

Walt Hampton  07:27

I learned that when we compromise our values and that our values, my values, don’t match with my partner’s values, we begin to lose pieces of ourselves, and I did not ever want to make that mistake again. And in fact, I came out of that experience thinking I would never get married again. I ended up being a single dad raising three young boys on my own for a dozen years, and I really believe that I probably wouldn’t ever get married again.

Achim Nowak  08:04

And I just want to, for context, offer this, because I know you married an Iranian gentleman, and I am from Germany, and for some reason, in Germany, there were a whole bunch of memoirs out of from German women who married Iranian men. It was always a disaster. So I grew up with these disaster Memoirs of German women marrying Iranian men. What did you learn from your marriage to an Iranian man?

Ann Sheybani  08:33

Certainly attest to the disaster of an Iranian marriage. And it, it’s, it’s just such a completely different culture. Talking about the Vietnamese experience and the romance, which led to, I, you know, I always loved different cultures. I was always fascinated by different cultures, and my natural gravitation was, the more different from me, the better that. Like, I didn’t want the guy next door. I didn’t want anybody that remotely resembled my dad. I wanted adventure, I wanted exotic, I wanted all of that. And so, you know, my an Iranian husband definitely fit that bill. But besides the cultural differences that were really not navigable, the thing I learned from that is that you cannot make someone love you. There is no man handling, there is no manipulation, there is no machination that you can assert or use to make someone see you as the perfect person, the person that they love. It cannot be done. And I think that marriage was an exercise for me to get somebody who wasn’t really interested in me or or a good fit for me. Like to love me and like, I would not recommend that for anyone. It’s like a bad move. So when I met Walt, just to kind of leap ahead, and we did meet. We met on match.com when we met, there was an immediate fit there was not just because he’s a hot dude, right? You know, let’s put that aside for the moment.

Achim Nowak  10:30

I appreciate you sneaking it in. Aunt Shay Bonnie, just thinking,

Ann Sheybani  10:35

but he absolutely made sense in the fact that he looked at me for everything that I put out there on the table, because I learned, do not misrepresent yourself, do not try to be somebody that you’re not because you ain’t changing you. Better find someone who’s going to like you for who you actually are, because we can become anybody we want to become, but to have somebody look at me and see the fit and be excited about the person that I actually am, that there’s nothing better than that

Achim Nowak  11:13

Walt first meeting within besides the fact that she’s hot like you are, You’re too hot people. So let’s establish that. But beyond that, what made you want to keep going?

Walt Hampton  11:26

Well, first of all, I could not possibly fathom that this woman that I was meeting for the first time actually had all of the ingredients of the ideal for me, her match.com profile said that she enjoyed a little black dress as much as she enjoyed Gore Tex. And I thought, oh, Gore Tex, that’s that outdoor gear. She must be the real deal there. And you know, in fact, for me, Anne is smart and sassy and driven for me, the beautiful Cinderella, all of it, I sat there in that first meeting thinking, no, no, this can’t possibly be true. And so coffee at Starbucks led to several long runs in the woods, to a few early mountains, to being on Kilimanjaro, and just the grand adventure unfolded. So it was just what kept me curious was, Wow, really this exists out there.

Achim Nowak  12:28

Yeah, I so appreciate the phrase of what kept me curious. If I can throw that back at you. Ian Waldo already gave us a sense of because I think of you as you both as a well matched couple that leads an adventurous life, and there’s a lot more than my little box right now, but you know, Walt gave us a preview. What kept you curious about Walt in the beginning?

Ann Sheybani  12:57

Oh, boy, I kept looking for what I wouldn’t like. You know, because I would say a warning sign for me is to see somebody and to immediately place them on a pedestal and to project what it is that I want or need in another human being. And it’s the, you know, the typical thing in an early romance, we’re clouded by what we want another person to be. And knowing that, that that’s a tendency. I kept looking for, what am I projecting, and what is actually there? And, you know, I had never wanted to marry the boy next door. I recognize that I’m complicated, so I was waiting to see what kind of reactions I get when my life complications would crop up. You know, kids with a dead dad and the divorce like just I had a lot of needy things in my own household, and I was curious to see, how is is he going to apply pressure? Is he going to demand more attention from me than I’m capable of giving? How is he going to respond to my life because I didn’t want to fool myself.

Achim Nowak  14:24

Yeah, where my mind is going as we’re talking, you know, as the what I’m hearing is that the discovery went, Oh my God, it just got better, you know, like, I like this person, and I’m not noticing these old script scenarios being played out. But another thing that I’ve seen come up in people who are together, who are professionals, have strong identities. At some point. You also there’s some professional connection and overlap and some collaboration, which can be exciting. More difficult or enhanced or already tracked, right? How did you go from Wow, we’re having some interesting explorations together to are we going to do some professional things together?

Walt Hampton  15:14

So Anne’s first Christmas gift to us as a couple was two tickets to Tony Robbins, Unleash the Power Within. And I at the time, as you alluded in the introduction, I was the managing partner of a law firm and dressed in a well tailored suit every day, and drove the nice car and did all of the the very conservative lawyerly things. Said, Oh no, I’m not going to go to something like that and stand on chairs and drink the Kool Aid and chant and all of that. And she said, Oh, it would be good for us. And it was, in fact, life changing. I we went, we met incredible people. We stood on chairs and chanted. And it was me who then, after Tony’s offer of the two or three year mastery university program was talking Anne into the fact that, oh, we got to do this thing together. And it was in that context that we began to see that the things that drew me, I was a really successful but dissatisfied lawyer, and I yearned for something else. And Anne had these visions. We saw the possibility of these visions coming together and and that was the inflection point that one day gave rise to one literally on the back of a napkin. We created summit success.

Ann Sheybani  16:36

Anne, I would say that when I met Walt, maybe I was 42 I was just starting to become ambitious, because I was not an ambitious human being before, I was very much a passenger in a car, and the idea of an entrepreneurial endeavor didn’t hadn’t really occurred to me. You know, I had gone back to school at 38 to study writing, because I was in a position where I could do that. I was working and going to school. And when I met Walt, he was running a law office, he thought like an entrepreneur, I started seeing the possibilities. So after we went to this Tony Robbins event, I started thinking bigger for myself and for us, and I started seeing the possibilities of what I could do with my writing, what we could do out in the world of coaching, what we could do together. I think, because let me just step back half a second. I think it’s very difficult to become an entrepreneur when you don’t have a safety net, you don’t have money, or you don’t have a really solid support system, and I felt like I had a really solid partner, a really solid support net underneath us. So when we began to pursue the idea of Summit success, I wasn’t terrified, and because I wasn’t terrified, because the fear was lacking in me, and I felt like as a team, we could do anything, the vision and the possibilities really opened up, and we began one step after the other, until we find ourselves today doing what we do.

Achim Nowak  18:27

A couple of things come to mind as I’m listening to you, I want to go with books and writing and literature. First, you both are wordsmiths. You both love literature, you’re involved with it in different ways, but might have a hunch that that’s a strong bond between you two. Would you both speak about two ways, one your love of literature, but also how that contributes and enhance to your relationship and enhances it?

Walt Hampton  19:01

I would say that it suffuses and surrounds just about everything we do. You know, we’re Ultra distance runners and mountain climbers, and it would be a rare long run or climb, as we did this morning, not to be talking about what we’ve read or what we’re reading or what we want to read, so it is part of our life. You know, I will look at Ann on a Saturday afternoon. She’s already into the book review from the New York Times and telling me what she’d recommend. We are glad that this is not being video recorded, because around me and underneath of my feet and everywhere there are piles of books that we’ve read or or still to be read, and you can see behind and that they’re just piles, piles there too. And so it’s just part of the glue, I think that keeps us together, because we’re engaged in ideas, and that’s such a joy to personally, to be engaged in. Ideas, but to have a partner who shares that joy,

Ann Sheybani  20:03

I would say, you know, when Walt and I met, he was on this really weird bent. He was reading everything there was to be read on the rise of Christian nationalism during the Carter administration. So we started talking about, you know, what happened during the Carter administration, and how this started taking off. And I thought, oh, man, what a weirdo. I love that like, What a weird topic to be obsessed with. And at the time, I was in grad school, studying literature and whatnot, and reading novels and short stories and going more the classic setup. So I think my taste is, is a little bit broader, like I would be talking about, I don’t know, Edith Wharton or some such nonsense, but there’s such a big, yeah, before I go further, I want to, I just kind of want to jump to the idea that it’s not just the ideas. It’s not just the big ideas. One of the things that I get out of writing and editing and being in Book World is the idea that I get to be in people’s heads and I I get to see a way of viewing the world, a way of perceiving what’s going on around an individual that so differs from the way I see the world that I can’t think of anything more intimate than that, and as Somebody who values being seen for who I am. I also so value when somebody allows me to see who they are without all the camouflage. And I remember reading your book, Achim, and I don’t remember the title of which book it was. It was you in yellow, a yellow cover with you. A moment, yeah, yeah, the moment I remember knowing you. I think it’s not just the ideas, it’s the soul, it’s the it’s that person that allows me to see them and to experience them like I think it’s easier in a book because somebody is alone and they’re putting that on the page, they’re putting their thoughts and their ideas and their soul on the page. And it’s easier for them to do that because it’s gone, it’s away from them. But the intimacy is what draws me to books. Yeah, I

Achim Nowak  22:41

totally get it. I’m blessed to be in a relationship with a very, very smart lawyer. I know how his brain works. We don’t like all the same things, but, boy, we constantly send each other things because we know what we’ll enjoy. But I also will send him things to annoy him a little bit, because I know what will annoy him, you know, in a good kind of way, because, but the fact that somebody is interested in receiving something that I think you will have a reaction to, is a beautiful part of our relationship, of how we spend time with each other. So I totally get what you said. I want to briefly cover this before I get to your very adventurous shared life together every because every topic I bring up, we could spend an hour on you both are many things, but you both work as coaches. I think of you Walt as a originally, when I met you, I thought, yes, of a business coach for entrepreneurs who want to live in traditional life. But recently, as I follow you, it’s about a coach for the whole thing, business life, everything. And I think of you as a Anne, as just a you use the word book coach. You have a publishing business, you just spoke so beautifully about what you love, about writing, but maybe looking from each one of you. And it’s an impossible question, but if you had tell me a story, an example of when you were following this profession of yours, and long ago, this is why I do this. This is why I love being a book coach. This is why I like being a business coach to help people have a bigger life. What comes to mind for

Walt Hampton  24:29

me, it is a gift and a privilege to enter deeply into another person’s life. What I discovered, and I think maybe that is what you saw as an inflection in my work Achim, is that I discovered that most, or many business challenges are personal challenges in disguise and the gift that I. Have with someone with whom I’m privileged to work is to be able to hold space with them. Oftentimes, the people I work with are evolved enough, or have risen sufficiently in their professions or careers where they are in leadership positions, which is great, except that it becomes lonely and there aren’t very many safe places to go and say, you know, I’m not sure I don’t understand, or I think I’ve made this mistake. And then to be able to dive deep into their world and to understand the pieces and the connections such that they become more able to serve the teams they’re leading, to make the impact that they want to make in the world. And so for me, it’s the gift and the privilege, I guess, not dissimilar from what Anne has shared of creating deep intimacy with the people I get to work with.

Ann Sheybani  26:01

I think the first story that popped in my head when you asked that question was the story of Theresa, and I won’t use her last name. I had met her in a marketing group that I was part of, and she’s quite a bit older than me. I’m I’m 62 right now. I’d add 1011, years on top of me, and she had, really, she was a weight loss coach, and she was trying to learn how to take that business online, rather than being stuck in brick and mortar. And God, this poor woman suffered with technology. And, you know, she wasn’t flashy, she wasn’t the sexy person who walks in the room and grabs everybody’s attention. So she had this a lot of insecurity, and she’d come deciding that she wanted to write this legacy book of hers because she’d been working as a dietitian, weight loss coach for like, 30 years, and I remember taking it on and thinking, Oh, this is sweet. We’ll try to get her a book. And I had completely dismissed her, because when she walked into a room, she dismissed herself, and when she started talking about her clients, the people that she had helped over the years, and what she knew like, all of a sudden, I thought to myself, holy, crap. This woman knows her stuff. This woman is like the people that she was helping, and the stories that she was telling just completely blew my mind. And so, like everything in me was like, We got to get this here. Like, I need this story here. It was like this revelation of who someone actually is and and the power that they have that they don’t even know they have. And then it lands on the page, and we help and you know, like, shape that. By the time I finished helping her with this book, I’m like, handing this book to people like, You got to read this. You like, can’t believe that I you know, like, it just changed the way I saw the world. And this was from somebody I had dismissed like that. And I think, like, the surprise revelation of a human being is that that’s so much fun.

Achim Nowak  28:49

I I love so much about the story you just told. I kept thinking the phrase in my mind was the power of substance in somebody, and seeing the substance and feeling it and learning that we were wrong, which is a very powerful thing. Thank you for that. Anne, I’m going to keep jumping around, because when I when you two first showed up on my social radar, in my mind, you were this very cool, glamorous, entrepreneurial couple who lived somewhere in remote Ireland where you lived for a while. And as our listeners are listening, they might go, damn, how did these two end up in a remote part of Ireland, and how did you two as a couple, decide that that’s what you were going to do. Would you just elaborate on that?

Walt Hampton  29:47

So when we were married, we had both been married before, and dear friends of ours came to us and said, we would love to give you a wedding gift, but we have no idea what to give. You, because You have everything. But we had this lovely little cottage in West County, cork Ireland, and we’d love if you might use it for your wedding gift as part of your wedding trip. And Anne was in school still at the time, and I was still busy managing a law partnership. And we had, now, you know, we were Anne had two kids, and I had four kids, and you know, it was not the Brady Bunch. And so there were a lot of complications. And I went home and said, Honey, do you want to have a you want to have a honeymoon? Do you want to have we have this opportunity? She said, Okay. And so off we went to Ireland. And we travel a lot, and we have lots of places that we’ve really enjoyed. But we got to this place in West County, cork Ireland, and our energy immediately came to rest. It was just it with the land spoke to us, and we fell in love with it. And for our first anniversary, we went back, and for our second anniversary, went went back and and then the Celtic Tiger of the economic Celtic Celtic Tiger, died its horrible death in 2010 2011 and real estate prices plummeted in Ireland, and we imagined that we could have a holiday home, a vacation house. And we found this little cottage high on a hill overlooking the North Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by 600 acres of dairy farms, it was idyllic. And when we first went there to close and to, you know, to paint and move in, we didn’t want to go. And so we began to stay there longer and longer. And because we had created a business before, the online thing was a thing. Before, you know, Zoom was a thing, or anything really was a thing. We had created the business as location independent, and the kids, kids were launched, and we could, and so we did.

Achim Nowak  31:55

And what would you like to add to that?

Ann Sheybani  31:57

I would say the thing that drew me there like, I like Walt’s got the ethnic background with his mother being, you know, ethnic Irish. I like old school Norwegian on both my parents side, which means you just, you should go to the Arctic instead. The thing that drew me was a sense of peace. There was this calmness about the place. And I think energetically, I’m I’m hot wired. I’m just go, go, go. I tend towards anxiety. And you know the constant need to drive forward and push forward and accomplish and do, do, do, do, do. And I would get there, and it would be like this natural relaxant for me, where some of our scurrying looks downright stupid to our neighbors like they were gonna, like calm down. So we naturally started calming down, and the fact that we had, like, dairy farmers on either side of us, we just watched the natural rhythms. You know, somebody coming up, the cows coming up for the morning, going down for the morning milking, going down for the afternoon milking, coming back up. There was such a rhythm that I think we lose track of, particularly in the East Coast, on the east coast where it’s the drive, drive, drive, fast, a lot of traffic, a lot of movement. And I I really loved that slower pace. And I miss that part of Ireland now because I come back and we’ve chosen a very sleepy village in New Hampshire to live in. So we, we were, like conscious about wanting to recreate some version of that. But I can’t imagine living in Connecticut or New York or any big city after that experience. It’s, you know, it just kind of took the desire for any of that nonsense out of me.

Achim Nowak  34:05

That was such a beautiful description of how, how place can change us, and at the deepest level, it’s always energy. I am thinking of my partner again, who I live in stupa Portugal, in a commercial fishing port south of Lisbon, and I was in the United States doing something, and we were on the phone, and he said, and he’s very he’s a driven type, a lawyer, entertainment lawyer. He said, I don’t even know how to tell you this, but every Sunday afternoon I go and sit at the harbor and sit on a bench, and I just watch people for an hour, and I feel really happy when I do that, you know? So that that discovery, that that was possible, was really powerful. Now, because this is a podcast about. The sort of changes we make in life, how they come about. I think I like many people in your orbit who know you, love you. When you left Ireland, which you alluded to, went to New Hampshire. I’m going to use the vernacular. People went, what the fuck what happened? So I’m sure there are many versions of that, because you painted this beautiful picture. So what happened?

Walt Hampton  35:29

So I would say life. Life happened. I have always loved this creation of your podcast, because we I think we have many acts. We call them chapters in our lives. And Ireland for us was this extraordinary chapter that we knew probably had an end date at some point in time, but then the pandemic came, and we used to when we lived in the States, we would be when we lived in Ireland, we would be in the States every six or eight weeks on business, for speaking gigs, for workshops, and we would treat the travel like getting on a Greyhound bus. It was no big deal. And the pandemic brought Curtin down on that and during the pandemic, we had two grandchildren who were born that we couldn’t go and see. I lost my dad during that period of time, and not of covid, but, but during covid, and no one could go anywhere. And so the chasm between friends and family that seemed like, you know, for us all those years just, let’s just pop on the plane and go to a birthday party that closed, and we decided that we wanted to have a footprint again in the United States. And so after things opened up, we began to shop. We created a short list of where we might want to go that would duplicate some of the environment we had, and we landed here in a beautiful, beautiful place in the Mount Washington valley of New Hampshire. And like the experience when we when we landed in Ireland, we actually spent the first fall here for a few weeks, and it was a glorious New England fall. And we thought, Oh, this is nice. And one thing led to another, and we decided that we would stay, yeah, man,

Ann Sheybani  37:31

I would say, you know, like we were talking about how energy can change you. Yeah, it can. I can say it can affect you. Well, one of the things that I think Walt and I learned is, wherever you go, there you are. My mother used to say that wherever you go, there you are. And the running joke between the two of us would be, we could be in Detroit right now. Not that there’s anything wrong with Detroit, but we just like we could be anywhere right now the way we were working and we don’t. We didn’t always experience our environment because it was Go, go, go, right. Like it’s who we are by nature. And so I there is that recognition that there is, there are chapters, and like, there’s complications in Ireland too. Like, if you live somewhere long enough, you pick up the complications, it’s like, I never learned to drive. Well, it’s just just like a nightmare to drive. And so it was coming like Walt would drive me, like Miss Daisy, and I would just find myself going, I really should learn to drive. And I, I had a doctor’s appointment, and somebody called me at like, 25 minutes before, and they said, you can have an appointment today. It’s an hour and a half away by car. And I’m like, that’s how you do doctor’s appointments. Like, can you imagine if I had a real issue there? And so there are little annoyances of living anywhere in any country that is not your own, that you pick up on, you notice. And I think when Walt, who is much more of a grounded, rooted person, I always describe myself as a, you know, the stone that gathers no moss when he got homesick, because it hit him first, he’s much more in tune with how he feels and what’s going on in in his life. My first reaction is, if that’s the chapter that we’re going to do next, let’s go choosing a place where we can hike, and choosing a place where we can ski, and choosing a place where, when we’re sitting in a cafe, the people around us makes sense. There’s a there’s a kind of commonality there that’s appealing. And so yeah, we did get a lot of like, what the why’d you guys move? We were loving your adventure. Like, sorry, next chapter. Who knows where we’re going to be in seven years?

Achim Nowak  40:00

Yours. Again, if I’m wrong, correct me, my sense of your new chapter in in New Hampshire is that wall that love for you to speak to. This is you had a more formal role as a spiritual leader that is tied to previous dreams and desires of yours and my thought of you as I watch you from the far end, is like, damn. She’s a publishing Dynamo. Now, she went from book coach to actually publishing whole bunch of stuff. So I witness you as a couple moving forward. But there is also new professional things emerging. So if you would both speak to that, I’m curious

Walt Hampton  40:44

at any significant inflection point. Of course, a move, or especially a transatlantic move, opens up new doors and new possibilities. And one of those doors that opened again for me when we came to the States, was that old, long thread from back in the day where I was the oldest son of an Irish Catholic mother and I was destined to be a priest and went to the seminary and for lots of reasons back then, didn’t pursue it. And revisiting that thread at various junctures across my life, I realized that there was still an energetic pull for me toward ministry, and very unexpected door opened for me when we came back to the states where I could finish the training to become ordained, which I did, I went back to seminary, spent nearly two years again in seminary, and finished and was ordained, and then, out of the blue, had the opportunity to shepherd a wonderful little community here in rural New Hampshire that just fed that part of me that’s lit me up and excited me in so many ways, and it has deepened the work I do as a coach. It allows me to go even deeper, to hold space with another human being.

Achim Nowak  42:16

I so totally get that. Thank you.

Ann Sheybani  42:19

And so the whole publishing thing, I don’t know if you experienced this during covid Achim, but our business kind of blew up in a good way. It’s suddenly people had the time to start writing books. You know, the thing they kept saying, you know, when the time is right? Well, covid became the time is right for a lot of people. And it was one of those catalytic moments that had people coming to me and wanting to write books, and me figuring out how to do other things for them, and, you know, how to publish and how to how to build that out. And I found that, you know Walt and I’ve been having this conversation in the last two years, there’s been another uplift in our business. And sometimes I talk about luck, right? You have to kind of prepare for the luck, right? It’s not luck strikes and look what you create, but there’s people coming out of nowhere, and there are these weird tipping points in our business that we have to respond to, because you can’t keep doing things the way you’ve done it when there’s a tipping point. And every time there is a tipping point in our business, suddenly, more people want more things, and we want to be able to extend our reach and extend our ability to to help our authors. It requires some growth. It requires some active planning and strategy and changes in the business. So I would say this, last two years, I have learned how to run a business like a real business. And it’s not just me, obviously, Walt is heavily involved, but this we are suddenly this team like, oh my god, now what? What are we doing here? What do we need to hire? What do we need to do, like to make this, to make this grow. So there’s, there’s so much surprise in business building, and you’re so ill prepared when it hits. And then, like that, you figure it out, and you grow and you evolve. It’s been a real journey of becoming a leader and becoming a business person and becoming a strategic human being, and just, I keep looking around, it’s like, did we just get lucky? Like, where’s what in the world happened? And do you experience that in your business,

Achim Nowak  45:02

where my mind was going as you were talking is at some point the when we start committing to something, even if we don’t know how it’s all going to go, the tactics reveal themselves. The teachers show up, the allies show up, and we just keep doing it, you know? And part of what I enjoy about this conversation, which is about business and life, and then at some point, something else wants to be done, and we pursue something else. So it’s just this is the path for now, right? I just want to shout out here that a couple of people who I adore, who really, really fabulous authors and human beings have been published by you. Their books look amazing, so that’s a credit to just the quality of work that you’re putting out there. As we wrap this up, what I’m curious about, we’ve hinted at it, but going forward? Are there other hopes, dreams, aspirations, where you go? I’ve always wanted to do this, but maybe the time wasn’t right. And then the secondary part might be, well, how do I then persuade Walt that it’s a good idea to do that? Or, how do I persuade Anne that that’s a good idea to do that, like, how do you move and muddle through that kind of stuff? As a couple,

Walt Hampton  46:26

we just took up a brand new sport, which I had to cajole and persuade Anne into. And it’s back country skiing, alpine touring skiing, where you you put what’s what are called skins on your skis, and you ski up high into mountains on rugged terrain and and so we just, we just began that late last year, and are leaning into that this year. And it’s, it’s interesting to be a beginner again, like rank beginner again at something, even though the environment is a familiar environment, the sport is brand new. So that’s, you know, on the adventure side, where it is rare that we’re not planning the next adventure. We’ve got a plan to go to the Dolomites. We’re talking about Patagonia, maybe going back to Nepal and doing the Annapurna Circuit, or all sorts of stuff on that. But on the business front, and it’s already alluded to this, the more we get involved with the authors that were served and see how they want to make an impact in the world. The more we’re asking questions, okay, what else do we need to do at Summit to serve and support and so it’s rare that a day goes by where we’re not ideating new things to help the people that we serve that we have the privilege of serving make that bigger impact that they want.

Ann Sheybani  47:45

And I’ll go on the personal front, because that’s really know how I’m wired. I think that every time we make a change as individual human beings or as a couple, and we’re going to flip a chapter. Anytime you’re coming up against that flip, it’s change is very stressful. Change is the it represents the unknown. And you know, I’m someone who has always liked security, both Walt and I, you know, we make jokes about we like to know where our mugs are. We like, the fact that we’re each extremely predictable, and when there’s that opening of a new endeavor, you know, Walt’s example of wanting to pursue his old dream, what that would look like and what that would be like, I look at that, I’m like, Well, what’s this going to change? Like? What am I going to have to hang on for the ride? For what? How is this going to alter our daily existence? And the thing about being married to Walt is this is someone who just, man, it’s like, hang on for the ride. Like when Walt was the attorney, and then wanted to go into coaching, and then he wanted to go into speaking. I would sit back and go, Oh my god. How is this going to affect my life? And every time it’s been this fascinating combination of all these skill sets and all of these adventures, these changes are in and of themselves, adventures, and I’ll always go back to I wanted an adventure, and boy, this is a much better adventure than a lot of adventures I’ve chosen in the past. And with each of Walt’s adventures, I become someone new in his thing, but in my own thing, it’s an opportunity to pause and ask myself, What do I want to be next? I see what Walt’s doing. Walt’s fearless in this regard. He’s absolutely fearless, not me. Me, but it becomes he’s doing that that’s what he wants. Like, what does it mean for me? What do I want to do? What do I want to do? So, man, it’s a stretch.

Achim Nowak  50:14

You know what I’m thinking as you’re talking. I just have to laugh as I think of the arc of our conversation, because I’m thinking you ended up having the adventure with this super smart guy next door. You know what? You are running away from your entire life, and there he is, right? And how freaking cool is that. I’m sure it’s very clear to our listeners that you two are exceptional people, and you do very cool work in the world. So if people want to have learned more about what you do and all that stuff, where would you like to direct them to?

Walt Hampton  50:50

So Well, the kind of the hub would be summit dash success.com summit dash success.com and then for publishing, summit press publishers.com

Ann Sheybani  51:02

Yeah, yeah, I think. So, you know, we’re all over social media. We smear ourselves on social media. And so we’re fairly easy to find.

Walt Hampton  51:11

We’re easy to find.

Achim Nowak  51:13

So listeners go find them. And also, your social media is very both opinionated and actionable, which is a wonderful combination, so you will be enriched by following Anne and Walt. So thank you for the gift of this conversation. I’m delighted that we know each other and goodbye for now.

Walt Hampton  51:36

Bye, bye for now. Thanks for having us.

Achim Nowak  51:40

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The my fourth act podcast. If you like what you have heard, please like us and leave a review on your preferred podcast platform. And if you would like to engage more deeply in fourth act conversations, check out the mastermind page at Achim nowak.com it’s where fourth actors like you engage in riveting conversation with other fourth actors see you there and bye for now. You.