Marianne is a therapist in northern California who works with families with troubled teens. She has, over the past fifteen years, created a somewhat successful practice. But she recently consulted me because she was worried that the economy had made it difficult to keep her practice full; she felt that she was no longer making…
As I was preparing to present a workshop in Indiana for a room full of financial professionals, I overheard a small group of them discussing fishing. “Chris,” I called out to one of them at the beginning of the workshop, “When you go fishing, are you looking for just anything that will take your bait,
Two weeks ago, I wrote about the problem that occurs when a prospective client runs “hot and cold”—approaching you as if he’s interested and then blowing you off as if he’s not. I called this phenomenon the Approach-Avoidance Tango, because it has the air of a dance. After reading my advice, Mitch, one of my
I couldn’t help thinking of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol this week. Ebenezer Scrooge would have died a lonely, miserable man with no one to say a kind word on his behalf…if something unexpected hadn’t happened. In his case, that something unexpected was a ghostly encounter with his past, his present, and his future. Every
It can happen to anyone who sells a service: We speak to someone who is thinking about hiring us. She calls again with a question and leaves a message to call her back. We’re enthusiastic about the prospect of working with her—but when we return her call, she’s suddenly unavailable—forever. This is the “Approach-Avoidance Tango”,
A few years ago, I asked one of my clients, Carrie, if she had started thinking about saving for college for her one-year-old daughter, Megan. “It’s funny that you’re asking me this now,” Carrie replied, “Because I just recently sat down with a specialist in college planning.” When Carrie told me the name of the
