I’m Jehuu Caulcrick, former running back in the NFL for five years, and now I’m the director of engagement at Crossfire Group. One day I had a terrible practice, absolute bad practice. I missed a lot of blitz pickup. I had a ton of fumbles in practice. And it was back in the day where you actually had two a days.

We were going to lunch after the first practice, and I’m walking down the hallway and I’m smiling. The offensive line coach, the guy who recruited me still to this day, talked to him—Jeff Stoutland. He comes to me and says, “Hey, you just had a terrible practice. Why are you smiling? You don’t take football seriously, you know?” So he’s going through the whole gamut with this. We go to the dining hall. I grab my lunch, I’m walking, and I see him sitting at a table eating lunch. I was going to go sit with my friends, and I stopped. I went and sat with him and said, “Coach, you said I don’t take football seriously. You know, I’m always smiling. This is my story. I grew up in a war-torn country. I didn’t know where my meal was coming from. My father was killed. I saw my grandfather get shot in the leg, and my grandmother pulled the bullet out. I saw my brother get killed. I come to America, and I get a fresh lease on life. I’m playing a game. Yes, I’m going to be smiling. I get it, from the coaching perspective and everything. They feed their families off the production of 18/19/20-year-old kids. I get that pressure on your side, but let’s put things in perspective.”

From then on, we had a great conversation because he understood I cared for the game but still had that mindset of there’s a bigger picture here.

I remember that senior year we played a bowl game in Orlando. The last game, great time. Once again, it’s like going to college. After the bowl game was done, the day after my agent flew to the game, we had breakfast with my family. I signed with him. Had a week off. After that week, I went to Indianapolis and started retraining and preparing for the draft. That’s the biggest job interview you can have. No matter what level, wherever you are in your career, what your dream job is, imagine that times 20. Because you have to prepare. You have to understand, not just physically but mentally. The mental aspect is crucial, and you go to the combine, perform in front of all these teams, get poked and prodded by all these doctors, sitting in meetings with general managers, and have uncomfortable conversations with these GMs and coaches.

At the end of the day, unlike, hey, if I’m a business person and I want to work for American Express or something, I know where I’m going. You prepare for an interview with American Express. In football, you prepare for interviews with 32 teams, and you don’t know where you’re going to go or if you’re going to go at all. On draft day, you’re sitting there. The previous year, I had a 35th-round grade, but the next year was loaded with running backs—Ray Rice, Felix Jones, Tashard Choice, Chris Johnson. I’m at the combine; I’m 255 pounds, I run a 4.54. Feeling pretty good about myself. Chris Johnson goes and runs a 4.2. It’s like, okay, so you know that you’re battling that, and you don’t know where you’re going. You have all these teams telling you things.

Draft day comes, and I’m sitting there. The fifth round comes around. The Buffalo Bills call me, “Hey, Ju, we’re picking up with our next pick.” Great! Everyone’s sitting around, and the commissioner comes up and reads the pick: “With the fifth pick, Buffalo selects running back Xavier Omon out of Missouri State.” I was like, wait, that’s not me.

Then you go through that process, and I ended up being a free agent. But that’s the best thing that ever happened to me because I got to pick where I wanted to go. I had the opportunity to pick the New York Jets for two reasons. One, Jimmy Ray was the running backs coach there. Jimmy Ray played at Michigan State and had been in the league for over 40 years at that point, providing great mentorship from the coaching side. Number two, Tony Richardson was the fullback ahead of me, and he was entering his 15th year in the league. That was a guy who had a similar path to where I did; he was an undrafted free agent who found his niche. I wanted to know his grind, and he taught me different things, from the verbiage to the mindset.

Buffalo not picking me was a blessing. I wouldn’t have had the proper mentorship being under Tony Richardson. Having him as a mentor for two years really shaped me to be a pro, not just an athlete, but a pro from all aspects of life. It took a lot from that, and that’s why my career in Buffalo was even more special.

You have to realize if you want success, you’re going to have to have help along the way. Everybody that’s been in a place of success, everyone that’s had success that you see as the end product now—family, house, cars, vacation, lifestyle—those people have had some type of mentor growing up. I think that’s important. It’s finding the right mentor for you. Sometimes we lose focus on how to find the right mentor. You can’t go looking for a mentor just because this person has the lifestyle you want. You have to understand the story of the person. You have to understand the grind of the person. Is that a similar grind to what you’re going to face? Because sometimes that grind isn’t easy, and now it goes through that mental side of things. Are you tough enough? Do you have the mental capability to withstand and go through that grind?

Find similar interests, paths, and grinds. That’s what’s going to get you to that lifestyle. Having a mentor in anything you do is absolutely huge. Growing up, football was not what I wanted to do. I wanted to be in the business world. I wanted to wear a suit and tie to work. I wanted to play on a company softball team. I wanted to go to happy hours. That’s what I wanted to do growing up; I wanted to be in some form of business, some form of office setting.

So playing sports formulated the culture that’s needed to be successful in the business world. I was in my last year; I signed a two-year deal, and my last year the season was done. I didn’t get re-signed. I talked to my agent and said I was going to take the last summer and do nothing because since eighth grade, I hadn’t celebrated a birthday I missed. I didn’t go to my sister’s wedding because it was during camp and football season. I didn’t hang out with friends or go on vacation. I decided I was going to take a summer and just relax.

I always told myself that I wanted to leave the game on my terms because you go to reunions and see former guys that can’t walk, their knees are swollen, their backs can’t stand up straight because of the blood, sweat, and tears they put into it. I didn’t want to be one of those. I wanted to leave on my terms. That summer, I picked up golfing. I played three rounds a day, hung out, enjoyed life, and then one day, sitting after my lunch round, I got a call from Ted Thompson from the Green Bay Packers.

He said, “Hey, we want to bring you in for camp.” I was like, “Alright, let me talk to my agent.” I called my agent and said, “Hey buddy, the Packers want to sign me. I haven’t worked out since last fall. I’m going to tear every muscle in my body, and I think I’m done. There are other things I want to do.” That fall, I went to the Bills game and sat in the former players’ area, watched the game, and there was never a moment that I said, “Man, I wish I was out there running on the field.” There were moments where I thought, “Man, I miss the locker room. I miss joking around with the guys,” but there wasn’t a moment I wished I was on the field running or blocking. That’s when I knew it was done.

Now that’s where the tough part came: the transition from sports to the real world. The transition from being an athlete to the business world is tough. All that time you have this structure: this is when you wake up, this is when you lift, this is when you eat, you practice, you do this, you go to bed. You have that structure all the way through, and then you’re thrown into the world.

You’ve gone through decades of identifying as a jersey number. I was #30 at Michigan State. I was #30 with my hometown team, the Buffalo Bills. Now I’m Ju Caulcrick. The transition can go wrong for a lot of athletes if they get consumed by being the jersey number and don’t take the opportunity to seek other things while they’re playing. I was blessed with the opportunity to do some job shadows and internships. I’d say, “Hey, I’m interested in this role. Let me sit with you for a week to see what you do.” I did those things, so I had a bit of an edge, a foundation to see what I wanted to do next. For a lot of people, that’s tough because they’re just identifying as an athlete.

Now you have to use what’s in here to get you in the door and stay there. When you transition from sports to the professional world, it’s the same thing as being a big fish in a small pond. Everyone else in the office thinks you’re just here because you’re an athlete. You’re just here to smile and shake hands and bring in business. As an athlete, that’s what you feel. Everyone else might be thinking that, and you feel it. So now you have to step your game up. You have to be better—arriving early, working harder than the next person, staying late. All those things you can’t put on a resume come into play because you’re going against people who went to business school and have been doing this their entire lives.

These are veterans in the business world now; they’ve been doing it for five years, ten years. So that mindset shift and identifying what you want, what your passion is. You were so passionate about football. You were in the 1%. You played in the NFL. Now, what are you going to be in the next level? Find and identify that passion, and have the ability to humble yourself. Say, “Yeah, I was running out in front of 80,000 people, but now I’m going to walk into an office and be one of the people there, and I have that student mentality.”

You have to lean on people and ask questions. Humbling yourself to gain the confidence of your team is key because being an athlete can only take you so far. What gets you so far is your mindset. Having that humility and finding that passion you want to pursue for the next 20-plus years of your career is crucial.

So athletes out there, I always say if you have the opportunity to do an internship, take it. Internships are great for what you want to do, but they also help you weed out what you don’t want to do. Have that mindset as well. If you have the opportunity to be in one of those rooms talking to a team and you go to a professional setting interview, it’s a lot easier in a professional setting if you’re just yourself. You can’t sell a bill of goods because sometimes you will be exposed. If you say you’re this, that, and everything, and then two weeks later you’re not that, you’re going to be exposed.

So being yourself, if you learn to be yourself in those interviews and once again humbling yourself by saying, “It’s okay to say I don’t know,” you’ll go a lot further because the people looking at you will see, “Okay, this guy has a student mentality.”