Stand your ground--be yourself

As a Life & Career Coach, it's been challenging to manage the emotions that come with the ebb and flow of clients. It took some practice to depersonalize it, instead of feeling up and confident when I had a lot of clients, and feeling low and not-good-enough when my clientele dipped. I'm sure that's true for most professionals, but it's particularly true when you're running a small entrepreneurial effort.

In my practice, I offer potential clients a free, half-hour meeting—in person or using conferencing software like Skype or Facetime—to see if we're a good fit for working together. If we are, then we transition into regular one-hour meetings.

This summer, I had a record number of clients. As you can imagine, I didn't have time to think too much about the 5% to 10% of people who decided not to work with me after that initial consultation.

Given a dip in clientele, I've been thinking recently that I could use more clients. So, as you probably can imagine, it's been more noticeable to me lately when someone attends the consultation and then decides not to work with me. Doubt can come creeping in. What the heck happened there?!

I got one of these thanks-but-no-thanks emails this morning. At first, my mind wandered toward what I might have done differently to win over this client. Should I have tried to get him to talk more? Should I have tried harder to impress him or tease out his objections? Even though he had been upfront about past substance-abuse issues, maybe I shouldn't have talked so much about how I coach people with such a history. Maybe he found that to be too heavy.

Now, on the one hand, it's a good idea for a professional to be on the lookout for ways to improve. On the other hand, it's a mistake to try to win over every potential client and customer.

It was at this point in my thinking that I'd realized, not only had I not done a BAD job, but the consultation meeting achieved a PERFECT result. I'd asked questions and conversed politely and professionally, very much in the way that I would normally do when working  with any client. This person experienced a typical "professional me" and decided to decline. 

It was another reminder of how important it is, both professionally and personally, to stand our ground, to be ourselves. If we let people see our true selves, then "the right people" will be attracted and will want to engage with us. If we contort ourselves into what we think other people want to see, then we'll be putting out very "weak signals"; there won't be much to be attracted to, and we'll end up wondering how we got surrounded by all these ill-fitting relationships.