Nathan Deal does not begin with power. He begins with patience. Before budgets or crime bills or any ritual boast that Georgia is good for business, he talks about a children’s book he wrote after his wife passed away – a story in which a heron named Helen stands very still in the shallows and teaches a young cat to wait. “Patience is when you wait for things to happen instead of trying to make them happen,” the heron says. For Deal, that is not a moral for children so much as a constitutional principle. Leadership, as he understands it, is made from quiet disciplines – waiting, listening, practicing – long before it is made from votes.

He says he was shy as a boy. His mother, a schoolteacher, enrolled him in speech lessons he did not want, and he learned to edit the hesitations and filler words that betray a mind scrambling to find its voice. Debate followed, then the Army’s JAG Corps, then the state senate, Congress, and the governor’s office. The thread that binds those stages is not destiny but practice: first command of the self, then the earned confidence of others. In the Sullivan Foundation’s ARC shorthand, agency comes first; relationship and contribution only hold if the person at the center has been patiently built.

Deal describes leadership not as charisma or a singular vision but as a kind of inward apprenticeship: training yourself so that others may see, and trust, that you have done the work. Agency, in the Sullivan Foundation’s ARC framework, is the cultivation of that inward steadiness – the capacity to act because you have learned to govern yourself. When Deal speaks of agency, he returns to the small humiliations and patient drills of speech class, to the verbal tics he was taught to notice and abandon, to the early tournaments in which he discovered both a taste for competition and the humility that follows from losing. The skills proved foundational – he would go on to win state debate titles, a national Southern Baptist public-speaking competition, then the U.S. Jaycees’ national speaking prize – but what they instilled, more lastingly, was a self he could trust under heat. “If there’s a competition, I want to win,” he says, then adds the counterweight: competition brings out the best only “if you’ve disciplined yourself first.”

At Mercer University, where he was student body president and cadet commander in ROTC, Deal graduated into the Army’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps, then into public law practice, then into the Georgia Senate, the U.S. House, and, finally, two terms as governor. Along the way, there were detours that only later took shape as a pattern. As a young Army lawyer, he was assigned to the Military Police School rather than a courtroom and ended up writing and teaching a curriculum on the legal principles of civil-disturbance control – just as protests and riots erupted in American cities late in the Vietnam era. At the time, it must have felt off-track; in retrospect, it taught him that precise rules and calm preparation – understated virtues – decide whether fraught situations turn explosive. That idea, too, is a form of agency: you prepare so that you can be patient.

The Sullivan Foundation’s Fellows ask how a person learns to lead – how you move from private effort to public effect. Deal’s own answer, in essence, arrived earlier than most. In 1964, he received the Algernon Sydney Sullivan Award at Mercer, a medal reserved for graduating seniors whose lives reflect “noble character, hearts of a humble servant, who place service before self-interest.” At the time, he didn’t know why he had been chosen. Later, he felt he ought to prove himself worthy of it. The sensation will be familiar to any twenty-one-year-old suddenly given an honor with an old, demanding name: you feel a small, insistent debt. That unease can be unsettling, but in his telling it was an impetus toward steadier work.

Agency, in the ARC framework, is only a third of the story. Relationship – how one engages opponents, assembles a team, yields credit – is where Deal sounds least like the stereotypical executive. He makes a point of saying he learned to listen early because he had to: as a rookie state senator unexpectedly assigned to chair the Judiciary Committee, he found himself the caretaker of three-quarters of the proposed laws flowing through the chamber. If he wanted those bills to become something passable, he had to hear what their authors wanted and what the chamber would tolerate. “You can contribute,” he says, “without taking the credit.” In practice, this meant revising another senator’s troubled draft with staff, bettering it, then leaving that senator’s name on the bill. The trade-off is obvious: one gains an ally by giving up the applause line. The value is more subtle: you assume that other people’s aspirations are as legitimate as your own, and that your role is not to defeat them but to make their ideas stronger, fairer, and more suited to reality.

When Deal talks about conflict, he sounds like a man who has accepted that power in a republic is always distributed, always contested, always a little humbling. The image he reaches for is the Constitutional Convention – thirteen colonies, absent Rhode Island, bargaining their way into a union. “Compromise,” he says, “has become a dirty word,” but in a democracy it is the hidden cost of progress. This is not a sentiment that wins applause in primary debates. It is, however, how enduring change takes shape.

The example he returns to most often is the overhaul of the HOPE scholarship, Georgia’s lottery-funded program for college tuition, during his first term as governor. The math had stopped working: disbursements were outpacing lottery revenue; reserves were draining; a promise to students was becoming financially unsustainable. The plan that emerged – tiering scholarships, protecting core access while trimming benefits elsewhere, and distinguishing a full academic award – preserved HOPE’s reach while making painful adjustments. The bargaining was not costless: technical-college GPA requirements went up and then, after enrollment drops, were later lowered again.

Here Deal gives unexpected credit to Stacey Abrams, who at the time was House Minority Leader in Georgia (2011–2017). She argued that students in technical colleges required a different measure of potential than those pursuing four-year degrees. He agreed, and the eligibility rules were recalibrated. For Fellows, the lesson is not simply bipartisanship – it is intellectual humility. You do not know enough on your own; neither does your side.

If relationship is the habit of listening and credit-sharing, contribution is the long arc of action – what remains after the press conferences are over. For Deal, criminal justice reform was where his idea of contribution became most tangible. When he took office, Georgia’s prison population hovered around 55,000; costs exceeded a billion dollars annually; one in three people released would return within three years; juvenile recidivism was worse. He created a Council on Criminal Justice Reform, told it to begin with adult sentencing, then to reconsider the juvenile system he had once presided over as a judge. The method was incremental and slow: gather data; bring in sheriffs, judges, defenders, victims; sequence reforms year by year so that each could be accepted and absorbed; reinvest savings into accountability courts, reentry programs, and residential treatment. The politics were careful, the rhetoric unemotional. And the results, over time, were tangible: the state averted hundreds of millions in projected costs, expanded problem-solving courts, reduced its prison population modestly notwithstanding growth, and kept more kids out of youth facilities that had been expensive and ill-suited to their needs.

It is tempting to read this as a pragmatist’s victory, but Deal resists theory. He prefers the story of how to get a thing passed. The first year’s bill, adult sentencing reform, sailed through unanimously, an outcome so rare that “you can’t even get a motion to adjourn” by that margin, he says. The next year, juvenile justice followed, again with near-unanimity, and each subsequent session brought an additional, digestible piece. The theory here is nonheroic and, for that reason, teachable. One should not load the barge so heavily that it sinks. Do not assume that a righteous case can survive poor sequencing. And, don’t confuse zeal for legislative craft. Good policy is unromantic. It requires less outrage and more patience.

Patience is the thread that runs through Deal’s narration of his career – patience and, oddly, a cheerfulness about the unglamorous. “Educate people,” he says. Make opponents debate “on the undisputable facts.” This sounds like a platitude until one remembers how rare it has become to say aloud that facts can unite and persuade. The requirement of patience also curbs a leader’s appetite for constant motion. “Sometimes you have to wait for things to happen,” he repeats, channeling the heron, Helen, from his children’s book – standing on one leg in the shallows, very still.

There were, of course, projects that moved quickly enough to notice from an airplane window. If you fly into Atlanta today, you land in a state that has marketed itself so successfully to employers that “business climate” has become a kind of brand. During Deal’s tenure, and extending after it, Georgia topped national rankings for business friendliness, and corporate headquarters moved or recommitted: Porsche built its U.S. headquarters and experience center on the airport’s edge; Mercedes-Benz chose the Atlanta metro for its North American HQ; logistics and advanced manufacturing followed. Deal will tell you this is not magic; it is workforce. Align technical colleges, apprenticeships, customized training; repair the pipeline from classroom to shop floor; and companies will see the state as a solution rather than a risk.

If you listen to Deal long enough, you hear that agency for him is indistinguishable from self-discipline; relationship from listening and credit-giving; contribution from durable work that outlives your term. The three ARC principles are not a trio of buzzwords but the grammar of a life. And yet he is careful not to cast his progress as linear or solitary. He learned by assembling a collage of mentors rather than emulating a single heroic figure. “People ahead of me,” he says – older students, senior lawmakers – “had done good things. I focused on the good parts.” This is more than modesty. It’s an argument about how leadership actually reproduces itself: piecemeal, discerningly, by borrowing what is valuable and leaving the rest.

There is another strain of borrowed wisdom he returns to: the notion that listening is not silence but work. He laughs when told the word listen is an anagram of silent, as if it were a lesson he once gave his own daughter. But he insists that the skill is political, not just interpersonal. You listen not to be polite but to persuade. You cannot move an opponent you have not understood. Nor can you learn which of your own premises are unsound. In this sense, listening is both strategic and moral. It concedes that other people’s experiences frame the truth, that facts have to be assembled collectively – even in an era that treats facts as partisan badges.

Certain stories of leadership emphasize decisive moments: a crisis, a choice, a signature. Deal’s version is more granular. Consider his description of revising bills for other senators and leaving their names on the masthead. It’s a minor practice, almost clerical. But repeated over time it becomes a culture: a legislature less obsessed with credit, more concerned with the quality of the product. Or consider the HOPE restructuring – to some, a betrayal of a universal promise; to others, an act of fiscal realism. The only way through, he insists, was to negotiate the details in good faith and admit what was fiscally true. He openly gives credit across the aisle here; the praise seems uncalculated. The persuasion was mutual, the result an instrument of policy that could be tuned as conditions changed.

When Deal says “compromise,” he does not mean capitulation. He means the insistence that the thing you are building be able to survive in a world of other wills. For students soon to enter workplaces where incentives are skewed and rewards uneven, the lesson is not cynical but liberating. Moral seriousness often looks like paperwork. It is the patient redrafting of a juvenile code that no one cheers for, or the quiet lowering of a GPA threshold after enrollment has collapsed – a small adjustment in policy that turns out to be an act of equity.

Practical takeaways for ARC Fellows

  • Agency (Self-Discipline): Build one skill deeply that makes you dependable under pressure (for Deal: public speaking and preparation). Treat competition as a proving ground for poise rather than as a referendum on your worth.
  • Relationship (Listening & Credit): In rooms where you have leverage, use it to improve other people’s work and let them keep the credit. Listening is an instrument of persuasion, not passivity.
  • Contribution (Durability): Sequence change. Educate stakeholders on facts they cannot dispute. Measure success in years and second-order effects (e.g., recidivism, enrollment, workforce readiness), not in headlines.

If this sounds simple, consider the personal side: a shy child whose mother insisted on diction lessons; an Army lawyer teaching police about restraint during unrest; a governor revising juvenile codes and scholarship formulas because that is where the arithmetic and the empathy pointed. The philosophy here is not showy or flashy. It is, nonetheless, radical in a time that prizes fervor over craft. Simply, master yourself; hear others; build what lasts.

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