We’re doing a hot take this week, and it’s this: waiting until you’re ready is mostly just waiting.

I know. Controversial. Somebody call the ready police.

But I sat down with Nick Kleitsch this week, my coaching client of two years turned podcast guest turned guy who apparently thinks in one-liners, and by the end of our conversation I was rethinking basically every time I’ve told myself “just a little more prep and then I’ll do it.”

A guy who answers the easy question the hard way

I asked Nick the standard opener: Who are you, what do you do, who do you help. Easy question. Everybody’s got a thirty second answer ready to go.

Nick did not give me the thirty second answer.

What I got instead was history, medieval TV shows, a wife who is (his words) a better athlete than he is, and this stubborn, almost annoying amount of optimism about people. I could have redirected him back to the elevator pitch. I didn’t, because what he was actually showing me was the whole point of who he is as a coach: someone nuanced, full of ideas and knowledge, and energetic as all get out to dive into what’s coming next.

He doesn’t pick clients by age or industry. His first client is a sixty year old woman planning her retirement. What he’s looking for is willingness. You either show up and do the work or you don’t, and the rest of the details don’t matter nearly as much as we think they do.

The fifty percent rule

Nick and I have spent two years leaning on CliftonStrengths in our coaching work, and two of his show up loud in this conversation: Learner and Activator.

Learner, you can probably guess. The guy wants to know everything about everyone, always.

Activator is the one that’ll mess with you a little. Nick does not wait until he’s ninety percent sure. He’s out the door at fifty, sixty percent, because (and I’m paraphrasing him here) you gain so much from just moving that you close the gap faster than if you’d sat there thinking about it all weekend.

You might be saying, “Molly, that sounds like a recipe for chaos”… and sure, sometimes it is. Nick’s honest about that. Not everybody meshes with his intensity, and he knows it. But his logic holds up: you almost never regret moving too soon. You regret sitting on it.

What baseball teaches you about a bad Tuesday

Before any of this, Nick played college baseball, and he brought a line from a respected NCAA coach into our conversation about mental toughness that I haven’t stopped thinking about: what does it take to break you? What it takes to knock you off your job, your process, your path?

In baseball you can go four for four one day and 0 for four the next, and both are just Tuesday. Nick’s filter for handling that is dead simple: is this a major failure or a minor one? A strikeout is minor. Don’t hand it more weight than it deserves. A genuinely bad call in a big moment, that one might be major, and that’s worth going back to the drawing board for. Either way, the question was never whether you’d fail. It’s how fast you get back in the box.

The season nobody warns you about

Nick didn’t dress this part up for the mic, and I appreciated that. After college, he got an OWI, and his baseball career ended abruptly. Up to that point, baseball had been his whole identity, and then it wasn’t anymore. He described the stretch after that honestly, and he described what came out the other side just as honestly: the big questions. What’s the actual point of my life? What am I here to do? That season is what eventually built the guy sitting across from me two years into our coaching relationship.

Nothing is wasted, my friend. Not even the worst season.

Why nobody stays coached

Here’s the question from Nick that I keep circling back to. We had teachers and coaches around us from kindergarten straight through college. So why do we assume, the second we walk off a graduation stage, that we’re done needing that?

In our conversation, Nick talked about neuroplasticity, about the fact that your brain stays far more capable of change than you probably give it credit for, and about a coach being one of the fastest ways to close the gap between where you are and where you actually want to be.

Not because you can’t figure it out alone. Because you don’t have to.

Find Nick

Nick’s just getting his coaching practice off the ground, the Kleitsch’s Coaching Collective and his Modern Warrior program, and he’s genuinely up for hearing from people. Find him at life-with-nick.com, catch an episode of his podcast, or reach out directly at kleitschn60@gmail.com.

And if any of this stirred something up for you…what have you found about yourself lately that you weren’t expecting? I’d love to hear it. Send me a message, or pass this one along to the person who needs the fifty percent rule today.