Facing a challenge? Be an action hero

“I just lost my biggest client!” Edwin, a management consultant I had coached some years ago, blurted out on the phone. “What am I going to do now?” Edwin’s client had been providing him with half his six-figure income. The loss had come, he said, through no fault of his own and at the “worst possible time.”

He spent the next few minutes woefully lamenting that he would no longer be able to pay his bills and saying how difficult it would be in the current economy to replace his client. Finally, he asked me for coaching.

Edwin viewed the loss of his largest client as cause for panic. It showed foresight that just a month earlier he had retained me to help him grow the other half of his business, telling me that he had become “too comfortable.” It may have been that he’d sensed his relationship with his big client was coming to an end. But now that it had actually happened, he was bemoaning losing that income.

“It may be true that you have no way to immediately replace it,” I said, “but do you believe that you’ll eventually replace it?” He agreed. Then I asked, “What has to happen for that income to be replaced?”