Six Steps You Can Take to Navigate Change and Create Your Own Desired Future

By Sam Waltz,

Founder & President

Atlantic Leadership Institute

and

Sam Waltz & Associates

Business & Communications Counsel

 

A few weeks ago, the Governor asked me, "Sam, how is it you've maintained the resilience to accomplish what you have in light of the issues you've faced in your life?" We were relaxing in a skybox on a marvelous summer evening, enjoying the Wilmington Blue Rocks, our local minor league baseball team.

I looked into the face of this 70-plus-year-old man whom I've known, respected, and cared for since 1986. That's when the DuPont Company had assigned me to be public affairs issues manager, policy assistant, and speech writer to him when he was Senior Vice President and head of one DuPont's most important $2 billion strategic business units.

In the intervening years, we've become mutual friends, confidantes, and counselors. Our lives have taken us in interesting directions since, with challenges for each of us too complex and perhaps too irrelevant to recount here, and our paths crossed many, many times.

After he ended his DuPont career to become a cabinet secretary, he subsequently served as lieutenant governor and governor of our State. Today, he represents a prominent east coast law firm in its business relationship issues in China, invests in enterprises and people in which he believes, serves on numerous boards, and adds value to the lives of family and friends.

After I left DuPont in 1993, I founded, and still run, two businesses and, in 1999 at the age of 51, became the nationally elected head of our industry and its professional society. I write often, speak around the country and the world, counsel others, invest, and serve on a few boards of my own.

Work - Life Counsel is a Legacy Builder

"Governor," I said, "I have no secrets. What I have learned, I have learned from you and from hundreds of other extraordinary people with whom God has blessed me. "In fact, His real blessing to me, Governor, is that today my work is about what I love, which is creating a legacy, to share some of those eternal truths with others, with friends and with clients who have become friends, just as you and I have!

"Who could ask for more blessings than that?"

The Governor smiled and nodded, and we turned back for a moment to watch our home team create the visitors' third out, so we each could stand for the seventh inning stretch, en-route to the night's victory.

As the shadows crept across the outfield that evening, it occurred to me that few of us take enough time in our lives to stretch, and to reflect. The Governor's question gave me the impetus to record some ideas - some of the cumulative wisdom at this tender point in my life - that I share with friends and clients.

Some people feel the world is divided between men and women. Or between old and young. Or between Yankees and Southerners. Or city dwellers and suburbanites and rural folk. Or executives and workers. These are demographics, tangible things, about each of us as individuals that tell the world who we are.

But that's not really who we are. Who we are, in my view, is shaped by how we see the world, by our value systems, and by how we act.

The above is an excerpt from The Last Job Search Guide You'll Ever Need: How to Find and Get the Job or Internship of Your Dreams, which is available for sale for $19.85 in our bookstore or $27.00 at Amazon.com but for free to those who subscriber to our free career newsletter. This hot new book contains job search secrets of the most experienced, most knowledgeable and most respected career experts. Learn career planning, job hunting tools and tactics, interviewing, cover letter and resume writing (lots of samples!), networking, and how to find an internship. Written by 149 career experts. To receive a free copy, subscribe to our free career newsletter.

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