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How to Win in the Ultimate Team Sport
(Perspective-changing your way to better client relationships)

Rowing is not a spectator sport.

My wife, Anne, who is a retired crew coxswain and I share this understanding as a little joke. (Coxswains sit in a boat seat and steer while calling the race.)

If you have you ever seen a rowing race, you will know what we mean. If you see a race in person, you only see the boats for the last 250 meters. It is analogous to showing up to your favorite sport for the last 5 or 10 minutes. Not much of what you might call high drama.

This would all change if you could hear what goes on in the boat during the race.

Recently, while doing a little spring-cleaning, my wife uncovered a tape from her rowing days.


Another momento from Anne's rowing days. This scene after the race was typical. A gold medal around her neck and heavy hardware in her lap.

This race was between my wife’s boat while she was at the University of Rhode Island (URI) and Radcliffe, which is part of Harvard University. It was a prestigious race that URI was competing in for the very first time in school history and Radcliffe was considered the race favorite.

This is part of the coxswain’s call,

“Great Job! They’re going absolutely nowhere. They’re going nowhere. We can take this! . . . Punch! Punch with each stroke! Lean on it now, every stroke! Lean on it!”

“You’re moving now! You’re down by two seats! Take 10 strokes for coach! 10, 9, 8, 7 . . . Great, you’re only down by one and a half seats! You’re moving up!”

“You’re bow to bow (neck and neck) now! 50 meters to go!”

“Let’s bring it home!”

“Punch it! Bow-to-bow! Everything you got! All the way! You’re UP by a seat! You’re doing great! Stay strong! Couple more strokes!”

“Yesss!!!!”

You hear cheers as URI wins the race.

The words alone do not do the recording justice. To hear Anne, the passion and intensity in her voice, her connection to the rowers, it is high drama.

And unless you are in the boat, you miss it.

You are not your client

I told Anne that I listened to the tape and how much I enjoyed it. By the look on her face, you would have thought I told her how much I enjoyed washing the dishes.

For Anne, this was just some old tape that should have made it into the trash. For me, someone who has never heard the call of a rowing race, this was high drama. It was exciting to hear the competition, the passion, the thrill of winning a race. For Anne, this was one of hundreds of calls she made over a 10 year rowing career.

Anne remembers some races more fondly than others. She remembers how the boat would move. She remembers going fast and beating other teams out of their racing jerseys. The call is ordinary. It’s part of the backdrop. No more entertaining than washing the dishes after a wonderful meal.

Anne and I demonstrate an overlooked component in client relationships.

One person’s trivia is another person’s epiphany

Anne is now a pediatric audiologist. She assists children and their families with hearing related problems. One of the most frustrating aspects of Anne’s job is when a 3-year-old will lose his hearing aids and the family will say nothing until they show up for their next check-up as much as a year later.

Anne has seen what happens to a young child unable to hear clearly for an extended period of time. Children who cannot hear, or hear well, suffer delay in their communication and intellectual development. For 10 years, Anne has seen this time and again.

Some parents, without the benefit of Anne’s experience, see the hearing aids more as a convenience than necessity. They do not realize or cannot seem to comprehend the damage they do by not replacing the hearing aids sooner.

Anne finds this very frustrating.

As you recall similar frustrations with your clients, I hope one lesson is becoming abundantly clear.

Your client does not know what you know

And perhaps just as importantly, you do not know what your client does not know. Perhaps solving this should be a simple matter of conversing with your client. A lot can be learned from conversation. But, you talk to your clients. They talk to you. Yet, misunderstandings are common.

There are a myriad of reasons why you do not get information out of your clients. Ironically, there may be just as many methods to help you get this information. Unfortunately, there is only so much help you can get from any interview, negotiation, or conversation methodology that will help you fill the pool of meaning between you and your client.

Ultimately, your success in preventing breakdowns in communication or other misunderstandings is best managed through perspective and practice. The practice, of course, can not be settled in a mere article. You can, however, change your perspective. Changing your view can produce more fruitful conversations with your clients.

There are two views that will greatly enhance your success with clients: the long view and the present view.

The long view

The long view is the integral view. It is when you see all of the pieces and how they fit. It is when you can have a conversation with your client today. Understand how this conversation fits with past experience and how this conversation will make a difference in the future.

When your client behaves in a non-productive way, you can perceive the external factors that might be influencing his behavior. You can put the behavior in its proper perspective: cry for help, need for a break, low regard for you, etc.

As an example, Anne had a very unique coxing style. Most coxswains are of the abrasive, tough-love variety. Anne was very different. She was trusting and supportive. Anne took the long view with her rowers. She understood that her interactions inside and outside of the boat influenced racing effectiveness. She was always able to get the best out of her rowers.

To adopt the long view, you need the following:

A reason for being

A reason for being is an answer to the question, “What am I here to do?” You got into business for a particular reason. Adopting the long view is more likely when that reason is about the effect you will have on the world.

Personal Example: The reason for being of the Happy Clients Newsletter is to enhance the value of the client relationship. When we say that, we are not referring to our relationship with our clients. Nor at its essence, are we referring to any specific client relationship. We work to enhance the value of THE client relationship.

That belief forms the basis of our interaction through you with this newsletter and all of our client engagements.

Reason—or purpose—should define your actions; not only with your reason for being, but your reason for being in a client engagement. Every element of that client engagement should be evaluated to purpose.

Open eyes

One of the exercises from my Aikido days was called rondori. Rondori is the practice of dealing with attacks from several opponents. You cannot succeed in rondori by focusing on a specific opponent, or worrying about the number of attackers, or thinking about your sore knee.

Rondori succeeds because of an integral, open view of the situation. No one item has any more prominence than another. You are aware of everything and ignore nothing.

The long view employs this same open eye. You are aware of the past. You are aware of what is going on inside of you. You know its lunch time and you are hungry. You know you have bills to pay, or a lead that you need to call back, or an article to finish. But none of this gains prominence in your attention. Just like the multiple attackers, you see everything and ignore nothing.

Everything is related. Everything is connected. Open eye allows you to see and appreciate the interconnectedness of it all, including the behavior of you and your client. Even if you don’t have all the answers, or the pieces to the puzzle, you can see how everything relates.

The present view

While maintaining the perspective of the long view, you have to remain present.

Many of the answers to your frustrations and misunderstandings are available in the present. Each episode, each conversation presents an opportunity to gain information. Despite this attention, you do not lose your awareness of the past. It simply gains no prominence over the here and now.

Rowing, at its best, contains a sublime example of presence. It is the ultimate team activity. To move at its fastest through the water, a boat has to have all of its rowers in unison. The oars have to enter and leave the water at the same time. They have to go to the same depth.

You can see the emphasis on this presence in Anne’s coxing call when she says, “Punch! Punch with each stroke!” She is coaching her rowers to focus on driving the oar with the power of their legs; each rower driving her oar at the very same moment.

To adopt the present view, you need the following:

A disdain for distraction

Distractions are a competition for attention in our mind. We often take steps to limit external distractions. When we want to concentrate we turn off the TV or radio, find a quiet place, close a window to the noisy street outside, adjust the lighting.

But, internal distractions in the form of thoughts or judgments can also compete for attention. The tendency to engage in distractive thinking works very much like muscle development. Take this quote from the movie, A Beautiful Mind, as an example.

“I've gotten used to ignoring them and I think, as a result, they've kind of given up on me. I think that's what it's like with all our dreams and our nightmares, Martin. We've got to keep feeding them for them to stay alive.”
-John Nash, speaking to department chair, Martin Hansen, about his schizophrenic hallucinations.

When muscles develop in the body, there is not only growth of cells within the muscle itself, but also motor pathways develop within the nervous system. The brain becomes more efficient at sending electrical impulses to those muscle cells. The body becomes stronger and more proficient with the exercise.

When it comes to distraction, this can work in your disfavor. The more that you can resist the impulse to let your mind wander during client conversation, the better and more proficient you will become at staying in the present.

Active listening

Certainly, this isn’t the first time you have heard of active listening (nor is it the first time it has come up in this newsletter). Usually, the reason given to practice active listening is to help your client feel validated or to give you an opportunity to get clear. Both are true, but there is another reason why active listening is so important for maintaining presence: accountability.

Active listening puts your mind on notice that you are accountable to listen to and understand what your client is telling you. Just as the John Nash quote speaks of feeding your dreams to keep them alive, giving yourself the expectation that you will be reflecting what you hear is a way to feed and sharpen your attention to what is occurring in the present.

Putting all of the pieces together

To discern what is real—in a given situation or within the mind of your client—you need to gather as many pieces of the puzzle as you can. The more pieces you can gather, the better will be your information. (Yup! Here it comes. ) Better information makes for better decisions.

To acquire a command of communicating misunderstandings out of your client relationships, you will need a few tools. You will need interviewing skills. You will need negotiation skills. You will need listening skills. And, you will need practice.

These are pieces to the puzzle of effectively mining client conversation for information, information that leads to common understanding. But, none of these pieces will help without the right perspective—the perspective that comes with the combination of the long view and the present view.

If you had to choose between skills and the perspective, it is always better to maintain the perspective.

An overlooked coxing skill is steering. Over a 2,000 meter course, a strong coxswain can save her rowers several strokes by steering the shortest line within the lane. A strong coxswain needs to have the long view of the race, the strength of her rowers, and the presence to keep them working together.

And if we could ever get a microphone in he boat to hear the call, you could share my newfound appreciation and respect for my wife, the coxswain.

Happy Client Retaining,

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© 2004-2007 Jeff Simon Consulting. All Rights Reserved. Wouldn't you love to peer into your client's head and know what they are thinking and feeling? Could you have better success at keeping and choosing your best clients if you could decode their behavior? Check out the Happy Clients Newsletter at: www.happyclientsnewsletter.com.

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