Conversations with Clients Part I
The 10 Yard Line
Like it says on my "about Nate" page, I co-own a personal training studio in the ski-resort town of Whitefish, MT.
I have a weird grab-bag assortment of clients from international business consultants and high-school athletes all the way to housewives, retired executives, and young entrepreneurs.
And while I’m a stickler for adhering to the exercise program with each client, I have to admit that I sometimes let the rest periods run longer than they should.
But often what I learn in that extra minute is simply amazing and becomes something I want to share with you. Therefore, Conversations with Clients will be an on-going series that will be posted whenever a truly great idea is presented to me during a session (with my client’s permission, of course!). I hope you learn as much as I do for them.
Diane Smith has worked at Alltel, Sprint, and a number of other large companies. She is quite possibly the smartest person I’ve ever talked with, and, like me, loves analogies.
Last week, she told me about her 10-yard line theory.
It goes like this:
We all have ideas, projects, and goals, whether fitness-oriented, business, personal or lifestyle.
Some of us are great at starting and taking immediate action. We can catch the ball and start sprinting.
Some of us can keep everything running smoothly. We break through tackles and side-step obstacles.
But after a little while, we all hit the 10-yard line.
And we freeze.
The goal is only a few steps away, yet we can’t go a step further. We fumble the ball. We get tackled. We twist our ankle. We get distracted by the cheerleaders.
And we fail.
Diane thinks some people may be scared of success. Others, she says, shouldn’t have even been on the field in the first place.
The 10-yard line is the moment of truth. It’s when all you’ve been working for is close to actualization; it’s a scary moment.
And it’s inevitable.
The trick, she thinks, is to define what your own individual 10-yard line is whenever you start a new project. Where do you think you’ll crack? What kind of things could happen?
This isn’t meant to stop you from picking up the ball; you’ve still got to run to get anywhere.
But you need to know that when you’ve got ten yards to go – when you’re so close to the goal you can almost reach out and touch it—you have to dig deep, put your head down, and push through.
Comments for This Entry
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For a lady, she sure knows a lot about playing football and the mentality of it.
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I'm getting ready to start my own personal training studio and I already know what my 10 yard-line will be: Marketing.
I just can't sell my self. It feels weird.
I'll figure it out though! -
@ Lars Vounder:
Selling myself has always been really hard. I'm a freelancer, so my livelihood sort of depends on convincing people that I'm better than anyone else at my job, but I don't like telling people how great I am. It feels like cheating or something.
I think I figured out a way around the self-promotion, though. I just started slow, keeping a day job and freelancing on the side, and when somebody liked one of my projects, my client would (hopefully) drop my name, and I'd get a new job. That ball got rolling, and while it's not as steady as a day job, it's steady enough to keep me sheltered and fed with enough left over to have some fun, and that's all I ever really wanted.
I still don't self-promote very much. If it comes up in conversation, I'll talk about what I do, but I still rely mostly on word-of-mouth. From what I've seen of Nate, I think he does the same (correct me if I'm wrong, Nate; I'm just going off interviews and random T-Nation posts).
@ Nate:
My ten yard line seems to be on both ends of the field. It's REALLY hard for me to start a new project, and it's REALLY hard to finish, but that middle 80 yards is what I live for.
COMMENT RULES: Critical posts are fine, but if you're rude I'll delete your stuff. Please do not put your URL in the comment text and please use your personal name or initials and not your business name, as the latter comes off like spam. But most of all, have fun and thanks for adding to the conversation! (Thanks to Tim Ferriss for the inspiration.)
Christopher Sean 8:05pm May 5, 2008