Steph Crowder (0:00)

Foreign welcome to the Courage and Clarity podcast. I'm your host, Steph Crowder. I'm a former sales training director who's helped thousands of entrepreneurs earn a living doing something they love over the past 10 years. On your journey, you'll need the courage to be bold, to take risks, and to do what looks crazy on paper. You'll also need the clarity, the brass tacks, simple strategies that actually work. And on this podcast, we deliver both in equal measure. Oh, and by the way, we've got absolutely no time for bs, gross marketing tactics or get rich quick schemes. Just sustainable business strategies for good humans with big dreams. If that sounds like you, you're in the right place. Let's go. Hello there CNC listeners. Welcome to the podcast. This is episode number 131, and the title, as you may have noticed of today's episode, is no Bad Clients. No Bad Clients. What if There was no Such thing as a Bad Client? I am so excited to talk to you about this today. I've been having so many conversations with my friends and also with my clients about their clients and how it's so normal and so typical for us to get in our heads the definition of what a good client is. What makes a good client your favorite kind of client, an ideal client versus a bad client. A client who disengages, stops talking to you, A client who ghosts you. A client who takes up too much of your time on the opposite side. A client who crosses all of your boundaries. And in other any other way you can think of is just not doing what you think they are supposed to do. By the way, if you hear any background noise, I'm actually sitting outside. Beautiful, beautiful day in Kentucky. So I had to sit outside for this one. Today's episode's gonna be such a good one. And I think if I've done my job by the end of this episode, I really want you seriously asking yourself the question, what if every client was a good client? What if there's no such thing as a bad client? What if there's just clients being clients? All right, so let's get into it. So, like I said, we've all had these thoughts where we want to maybe disqualify people on a sales call because you're looking at their application or maybe you've even worked with them before, and you're like, oh man. You kind of get that sinking feeling of dread in your stomach where you're like, this client's going to be a lot. This client's going to be a handful this client's going to really press me. Or it could be like, I don't know if this client has what it takes. I don't know if this client is willing to work. This can show up in so many different ways. But it's really important to recognize right off the bat the ways in which we believe our clients should act a certain way, our clients should show up a certain way. It's like you have a rule book or an instruction manual in your head, conscious or unconscious, that you believe your clients should be abiding by, right? And it's like your clients are not a refrigerator, okay? They don't come with an instruction manual. They don't come with a press this button and the water comes out of the spout, right? They're human beings. And yet, like I can say that and it makes sense intuitively. But if you really think about it, that's exactly what our expectation is of clients. We're thinking, you know, if they come into our program, if they start working with us, they should have good attendance. They should be self aware enough to tell when they're taking up all the time on your call, or they should always respond within the guidelines that you've put into place. Right? Whatever those thoughts in your head are that like, when you sit here and you think to yourself, I know most of you have an idea in your head of what's a good client and what's a bad client. Today we're really going to explore how all clients are just clients. And when you see it this way, a client who is behaving in a way that's triggering for you or upsetting for you, or frustrating or mystifying or however it is that that's coming up is just a sign that you have to engage with them differently. Okay? So that's really where I want us to start. This conversation is there's no good clients, no bad clients. What if you just were invited to look at it as there are just clients? Okay? It will be so freeing to see your clients in this way. It keeps us out of resentment, it keeps us out of burnout, and it can also help us stop feeling disrespected. If you've been feeling disrespected by your clients or even personally offended when they do or do not behave in a certain way, this is really going to help with that. The first thing I want to talk about with clients being good clients versus not so good clients is their participation in your program. Whether you have a group program or a one on one package, or however it is that you work with clients. I am willing to bet you have an idea in your head of how you think your clients should be showing up. They should be coming to your calls. They should be booking their calls with you. They should be participating in your community. Just get that in your mind for a minute. Okay? Now, we all are probably familiar with the feeling of a client who disengages, a client who disappears, a client who goes quiet on us. And that can feel really scary because I think in the quiet, our brain just starts going on the assumption, right? Oh, they. They stopped engaging because they don't like the program. Oh, they stopped engaging because they don't like me. That's really, like, the number one most toxic place that our brain goes. And the most common is, like, because most of us are solo entrepreneurs or very small companies, we fall into the trap of making ourselves synonymous with our businesses and our programs. And so when somebody disengages with their program, it makes that. It make. It can make you feel like they're disengaging from you, and you start to have all these thoughts in your head about now your identity is on the chopping block, right? Oh, what if they don't like me? What if they hate this? What if they don't think I'm any good? And I know personally how scary that can be. So we are gonna talk more about my experience with those types of feelings. And I see it so differently now than I used to, so I'm really excited to share that particular piece with you. But something I realized about when clients disappear and why they disappear is I'm gonna use a metaphor for this. Okay? I want you to think about a client who is in a shame spiral, because, spoiler alert, shame is the reason why clients disappear. It's not because they don't like. More than likely, okay? It's not because they don't like you. It's not because they don't like your program. It's not because they think you're the worst. It is usually has something to do with shame. And when your client is in a shame spiral, think of it as, like, drowning. They are actually drowning. Drowning in their shame, typically. Here's what happens when a client disengages. Maybe something has happened in their life. They have a personal circumstance or a professional circumstance. But a lot of times, like, especially if you're like me and you work with your clients for a longer relationship. I work with my clients for a year. Stuff happens. I always tell my clients, life happens, and life is Guaranteed to happen at least once over the course of a year. So step one and disengagement is a multi step process. Step one is something happens in their life, okay? They disengage, even temporarily. They disengage and then some time goes by, so they disengage. They're like, I'm gonna take a couple of weeks off to sort out my life. And then a couple of weeks turns into a month or more. And now onto. Here comes step two. Now we're gonna add shame onto the equation. So I'm feeling shame because not only has something difficult probably happened in my life, something preoccupying, it could be negative, it could be positive. People get busy and for good reasons. But now a month has gone by, or two months has gone by, and now I'm thinking to myself, oh my goodness, I made this investment in this program and I did exactly what I was afraid I was going to do. I'm not using it, you know? And this is where the shame really comes in. The thoughts can sound like, I knew I shouldn't have invested in this program. I never come through on my investments. Right? Now they've proven something that they were afraid of. True, right? They're like, I shouldn't have spent this money. I knew it. I knew I couldn't show up. I knew I couldn't make a difference. I knew I couldn't make a different choice. I knew I couldn't lose the weight. I knew I couldn't learn Spanish. I knew I couldn't get the transformation. Why did I do it anyway? Because now here I am, it's been two months and I've wasted my money. That's where the shame spiral can come in. Not a hundred percent of the time, but I think this is really common. And so they're spiraling, they're in the drowning. And often what we do is we. Even if you re. Let's say you reach out. I was talking to a friend who was like, when my clients disengage, I try everything to reach out. I send them a direct message. I send them a voice memo. And sometimes they don't even deign to reply. Bad clients, right? They don't even give me a response. And this friend of mine said, how rude, right? I'm sure you guys could resonate with that. You're like, come on, the least you can do is meet me halfway, right? Wrong. Okay, lovingly wrong. Here's why. If a client is drowning, this is like you. You asking them to meet you halfway on that is like you're on the shore and you're throwing them a life raft. Like, you're reaching out. You're like, dude, just take the life raft. Like, we'll pull you ashore. But when you're drowning, can you swim the six feet to the life raft? No. You're just barely keeping your head above the water. Right. And so what we have to do in that moment, clients can't reach out to you. They can't reach the life raft when they're in the shame spiral. It's not even resistance that they're having. It's just survival at that point. And so the question becomes, can you approach them with curiosity instead of judgment? What would it look like if they can't meet you halfway? How do you go a little bit further for the client? Oh, they can't reach the life raft. Let me get closer. Right. What does that look like? Sometimes it looks like creative problem solving. But I can tell you what it looks like for sure is it looks like not making any assumptions about what's going on with them. I cannot tell you how many times I've had a client like this and they're not replying, and I can't really get in touch with them. And then we finally connect. And it always, like, nine times out of ten, there's like, something that's happened, and it usually has nothing to do with me. Like I said, I've had clients who've gone through, like, really devastating diagnoses, right? Or had a huge medical event, so I don't see em for a while. Um, I've had clients, you know, just have incredibly huge, monumental life shifts that make them challenge the entire future of their business. So they go into the shame spiral. And so it's in those moments, like, I really try to never have the thought, like, oh, this client just, like, hates the program, or, oh, this client just, like, doesn't want to be here anymore. My thought is always, I wonder what's going on, and I wonder how I can help. Even if it takes some creativity, I'm willing to jump on and help them figure out what to do next. I'm willing to help them get unstuck. Like, I'll go the extra mile for my client. And that's because I don't believe that. Oh, that was like, good clients. And my good clients, they come to every call and they're the stars of the show. And then I have bad clients, and the bad clients have to sit in the corner with their dunce cap on, right? It's like, no, I Just have clients. And some clients are rocking and rolling and they're talking to me, and they're. That's great. They're swimming. They're swimming. And then I have some clients who are drowning. And it's like, if you were actually teaching a swim class and you had some. Some students who were swimming beautifully and then a couple. Couple students who are drowning in the back of the pool, you wouldn't be like, what's with them? You'd be like, holy crap, let me get in the water and help figure out how to get these guys swimming. Right? And so it's like, what would it look like if you approached your program, your clients, just like that? And so I think that gets us next into the next topic here, which is the myth of the good client. Right. So I do want to talk about boundaries because it is important, especially as you scale and as you grow and you. As you learn what works for you and what works for your clients, you do need to have boundaries. I've put a lot more boundaries into place in my business and in my programs, and it's made my programs better. It's helped my clients get better and better results. And so if you are like, I just want to emphasize, you are allowed to have boundaries. So let's talk now about, like, maybe a different definition of not. Your favorite client is a client who is needy. Needy client. You feel like they're taking a lot of your time. They just have so many questions. They, you know, are just like. You just feel like you're saying the same thing over and over. However that's showing up, you might feel, and this is a bit of a dramatic word, but go with me. You might feel violated. You might feel a little bit, like, worn out. Okay. If you're feeling like that, I want you to ask yourself the question, where was the boundary missing in the first place? Where was the boundary missing? Notice how this takes the blame off of your client and putting it where it belongs, not the blame doesn't belong on you. Let's call it responsibility. That's a better word. Responsibility. You're putting the responsibility on your client. Again, like, they should just follow the user manual like they're a refrigerator when they're a person and most people are. I mean, if you think about it, you're a lot of my people. My clients will tell me, I want ambitious people in my programs. I want people ready to get to work. If you have ambitious people in your program, they are going to try to get everything they can out of the. That's actually what you're asking for. Right? So if they're showing up a lot and they're asking a lot of questions and they're taking 30 minutes on your, on your hour long coaching call, you have to ask yourself, where is my responsibility? If it's not running the way I want it to run, how do I. Like, where did I not set the proper precedent in the first place? And so this is the exciting part. We can coach our clients to be better clients. Isn't that exciting? It doesn't have to be so binary of like, there's good clients and there's bad clients and we just need to like, hope our bad clients go away and hope that we could just start over with naturally good clients. Okay. Some people might get it off the bat and other people just need to be coached, and that's perfectly fine. So here's some ideas of how you can get through this moment of like, wanting some clients in your program to interact with you differently. Again, whatever that looks like. Maybe you're a web designer and you have somebody asking for a million bazillion billion edits, and you just want to have a process where there's like three rounds of edits. Can you see how you could install that and manage that not through blame, but through leadership? You can lovingly lead your client to help them get what they need without crossing your boundaries of having to do 15 rounds of edits. Right? So here are just some quick ideas of like, sentences that, that could help you if you need more boundaries. So I'll give you an example. I've dropped this one a couple times, but I have another friend of mine who has a program, a coaching program, and she was talking to me about a client that she really wanted to help this client, but the client was taking like a really long time on calls to kind of get to the heart of her question. And my friend was saying to me, you know, like, I feel like I'm getting all this backstory. I really don't need the backstory. I wish this client would kind of just get to the question. And so we brainstorm some ways that she could coach the client on how to receive better coaching. And actually that's a win for your client as well. They don't want to be sitting there for 30 minutes when 15 minutes will do, right? Like, everybody wins. And so we came up with the sentence, hey, here's how to get the most out of coaching. Right? Here's how to get. And you could do this on an orientation call. You can do this, you know, inside of your community. If you have like a, a pinned post like we do in our, both of our communities, sold out group programs and same day sales where we tell people like, this is the way to get the most out of coaching. And guess what? I'm always adding to that. When I realize like, oops, I forgot to put a boundary in place, I add something and I always ask myself, how is this boundary actually helping my clients? So to give you another example, in my programs, we tell our clients it's 24 hours to get a response from us in terms of like getting coaching. You can get coaching from us anytime, but you gotta give us 24 business hours. Now why is that? Like that might sound on the surface like it's just for me and my coaching staff to give us more time. Sure, that's part of it, to help us manage our workflow, but it actually benefits the client for a few reasons. Number one, we give better coaching when we have a chance to think about it. Sometimes we talk to each other. Haley is my support coach. Sometimes the two of us talk together and we do that a lot actually, and it helps us come up with different responses. And the other thing, the other reason why, the surprising reason why that has been really great for our clients is my clients will tell me all the time, hey, actually just typing my question in your community and thinking about it for a day helped me get clarity. I think we forget that coaching comes not just from what your coach is telling you, but from even formulating your question and having the courage to ask it. You will actually start to see it differently immediately. So more time can be beneficial and is beneficial to my clients. Right? So that's the first thing is saying something like, here's how to get the most out of coaching and be editing that, be updating that. Like I said, when you realize a boundary, you needed a boundary that wasn't there. Add it. Just make sure you've. My favorite thing to do is identify why is this update good for the client. Sometimes people will come to me and be like, I want to make this change, but I feel like my clients are going to hate it. I feel like selfish, right? Find why it's good for them. There's always a reason. If it's good for. Here's the thing, here's the most basic one. If it's good for you as the CEO, if it puts you in a better position to serve your clients, it's automatically good for your clients. They don't need and they didn't sign up for a burnt out, maxed out, tired and resentful coach. You have to do what you need to do to be the best coach, the best service provider, the best, however, freelancer, however you identify yourself. So that's the first thing. And then, for example, with the story that I shared, my friend could tell her clients, here's what we're gonna do on coaching calls. I want you all to focus on asking your question directly. Let's go ahead. And we don't actually need. Need the backstory. I promise it will be better if we just get right into the question, right? Like that's a boundary. No backstory needed. That's a boundary. Okay. And the other thing, I love this one. I tell this one to my clients on my orientation call is because sometimes you. And I've been in this position too with my coach where like, I just want to keep going and I want to keep talking on a call. And the truth of the matter is, if you have any experience in coaching, you know that this is true. Sometimes it can't all be solved in one day, right? Sometimes the question is too big. There's too many emotions. It needs time to like, shift and change shape with letting the coaching land. I always call this taking it on a walk. Sometimes I'll get coaching and I'll be like, I don't know how I feel about that. And then I take it on a walk and I go out in my neighborhood and I walk and I think about it. And after a couple hours pass, I'm like, I actually see that differently now. So what I'll tell my clients is sometimes we won't get to the bottom of every issue on one call. And that's okay, right? We can keep coaching on the same question and the same topic as many times as you need to. You won't feel complete every time. It's great when we feel complete, right? But sometimes it's too big and there's too much there and it's too dense and we can't go, you know, keep going at it like for 30 minutes or more, right? And that's actually in the best interest of the client. I think that coaching can have like a lot of diminishing returns, especially in a group where it's already, you know, vulnerable. I think you all already know this. You'll be hearing a lot more about this coming very, very soon. But I believe that group coaching is more impactful than one on one coaching. But it does require vulnerability. And being vulnerable for, for too long has a law of diminishing returns, Right? It starts to. It starts to be uncomfortable and not in the good way. So it's actually good for the clients as well if we set up the precedent that we're not necessarily going to be able to solve every issue on every call. So I mentioned this a little bit, but just to really hammer it home. This has helped me so much is thinking to myself, my job is to meet my clients where they are. As their coach, my job is to meet them where they are. Okay? And that requires asking that question, how do I move the life raft closer if they can't? If I throw it and they can't get it, how do I move it closer? And that also sometimes does require you asking the question, what does support look like for them? Not for your ideal process. A hundred percent of the time, I think sometimes we're like, hey, you've disengaged. Like, come back in and get coaching. Come to a call and for whatever reason, again, back to the shame spiral that might not be especially accessible to them in that moment. What do they need to get back on track? And are you willing to go the extra mile? Again, you don't need to cross all of your boundaries, but if you need to have a one off chat with them, if you need to point them to something specific to really help them grab onto that life raft, I think too often what I see is folks will be like, hey, like, let us know how we can help. And it's just not enough for your struggling clients to hold onto. And just remember, you don't have to bend over backwards for every person, but sometimes going a few extra steps is the exact thing that they paid for. That's the other thing that we have to remember is if you think about like a friendship, and if you, you know, in a friendship or relationship, it needs to be give and take. And you might have the thought, like, I keep reaching out to a friend and they're not reciprocating. So, like, I'm done with this. Like, what the. What the hell? Yeah, it's not the same in our coach client relationship. When you hire me as your coach, I have the thought. Part of what you're paying me for is accountability, right? Like, this is a. You've hired me for a job and if I'm having a hard time fulfilling my job, I'm gonna ask you some questions. Like, I think about my husband who's a consultant. He's a tech consultant. And he has projects, right? He has clients. And if he can't do his job because the client hasn't given him something. You better believe he's reaching out to the client. Like until the client replies. Otherwise he literally can't help the client. He can't fulfill the mission. And so wherein like, I think that there's can sometimes be, and this is a bit of a hot take, but there can sometimes be this entitlement in coaching where it's like, well, I tried and you know, they're responsible for their results. So if they don't, if they don't participate, like that's on them. And it's like yes and no. Right. The truth is you may not be able to get every single client who's gone off track to come back on track. But I do think all of us want to be able to say that we did do everything that we tried. So here, I wanted to touch on this too. Here's what I had to heal in order to get here because I'm pretty neutral about it now. When a client disengages, I don't really have a whole lot of like personal emotion about it. And I used to big time. So fear of something going wrong with my clients used to absolutely run my business. Okay. I've certainly talked in the past about how client pleasing and people pleasing was a big driver in previous versions of my business. I was really wrapped up in people liking me. And it wasn't until I became more concerned with client results. Like I may, I switched from clients liking me and from clients being like, yay, Steph, Steph. It's amazing. I love Steph. I mean, sure guys, we're human beings. It's always going to feel good to hear that. And if you love me, feel free to tell me, that's no problem. But since I focused, I used to be so focused on that, I now shift my focus to yeah, but what are my clients results? You don't even have to like me to get results in my program. Do you know that? You do not have to like me. I prefer you would. Right. But you can get results regardless. You can respect me and not necessarily like me at the same time. Right. There's a, probably a lot of people you can think of who you respect and you wouldn't necessarily go out to lunch with them or like have coffee with them. Right. So when I became more focused on like, hey, they've hired me, they, they've got friends, they don't need another friend. They hired me to help them get a specific result. That really changed everything for me. Because when I was so wrapped up in do they like me? Are they mad at me? Do they think I'm great? Do they think I'm amazing, or. Or not? That was absolutely terrifying. And what that led to was me having the belief that one person having one bad experience could ruin everything. And if for one second I thought that somebody was unhappy, it would completely derail me and I would be terrified. And I've said this before, but I. I mean, it's just like one of my favorite stories to share, but I literally closed my business over this. And I always say I broke my business before it could break me. Like, the fear of something going wrong, of a client being unhappy, and God forbid a client not liking me or my program, that was so scary that I ran away from that, full stop. So I understand how terrifying that is. Here's the way I look at it now, and it has changed everything. In addition to the piece about client results that I just shared, I always have the thought, when a client is not acting the way that I. My man. Like, I have a user manual for my clients too. I'm a human being, right? But I catch myself in it, and whether they've disengaged or there's something going on, I like to have the thought. It's almost never about me. It's almost never about me, right? It's usually something else. It could be that they're having a hard time figuring out how to make the program work for them. But that's not personal, right? It's almost never like, hey, like, if I reach out to somebody, it's never like, hey, I'm glad you asked. I hate you and I hate your program. Like, hasn't happened, right? Nine times out of ten, it's like a, hey, I stopped sharing because I. I'm feeling a certain way. Or, hey, I stopped sharing because I don't. I stopped believing in myself, or I don't know how to engage. I don't know how to make it work for me. I'm having an existential crisis. Like, that's happened, right? But it's. It's really almost never about me. And here's this, though. Here's the kicker. If it were to be about me, I would want to know that, right? Like, at the end of the day, I would want to know. Not so I can spiral on it, right? But so I can fix it. Everything in my, like, 2025 business identity comes back to the thought that I can fix any problem in my business, including a client having a bad experience. You can fix that problem. I can fix that problem. But not if we don't know about it, right? Not if we're too scared. I had a mentor who also used to always say, like, we gotta pick up a rock and look at the squiggly stuff underneath. Okay. Just because you're not looking at it doesn't mean that it's not there. And I don't know about you, but I'd much rather know so I can do something about it. Okay, so my friends, where I want you to kind of reflect as we close out this episode. First of all, I hope I've opened your mind to this idea that there's really no such thing as a bad client, a good client, a bad client. There's just clients. They're just clients. I actually have the thought and the belief I can help any client. And I do believe any clients. I really can. As long as you want the result that I teach in my program, like, if that's a result that you care about, then I can help you. Okay. And it's so freeing in my business to not have to get on sales calls and be like, trying to read the tea leaves and be like, is this client going to be too much for me? Am I going to be too much for them? Like, are they checking all these imaginary boxes in my head that I have in that user manual? Like, do they fit the user manual? No. They get to just be a client, and I just get to be me, and I get to meet them wherever they are. Most freeing thought you can have as a coach, I think. So I want you to ask yourself, like, where do I have that user manual for my clients? Where I'm expecting them to behave in a certain way, And I get rigid, brittle, resentful, and angry when they don't act the way that I think they should act. Right. What would shift for you if you believed there are no bad clients, only moments of miscommunication, shame, or missed support. Okay. So freeing, my friends. So I want you to recommit to curiosity in your coaching relationships, clear boundaries. And if you need more boundaries, that's a. Okay. Like I said, I'm always updating mine. I'm like, oops, we didn't have a boundary for that. We didn't have a boundary for emailing me when I'm on vacation. Right. Like, let's go ahead and update that. Like, what do we do in my programs? Like, I'll coach my face off. I coach multiple times a week. I coach every day in our community. But we have a boundary. I don't Reply to direct messages. Right. It's a boundary. Doesn't mean I won't coach you. I'll just, you know, and I. If I. That's, like, such a good example, because if I hadn't put that boundary in place, imagine how I would feel if a client just, like, keeps DMing me and I'm like, God, this client, they keep DMing me. Don't they understand? They can just post in the main area and it's like, well, no, I never told. I never told them that. Why would I be. Why would I be expecting them to just intuitively know that that's how I work. Right. We have to communicate it. And finally, I want you to be thinking about cultivating the belief that your coaching can rise to the challenge. You have a challenging client, A client that's feeling challenging for any reason. You can meet them there. You can rise to that. You can figure it out. You can problem solve, you can listen, you can ask questions. You have so many options. My friends. I hope you love this episode. So fun for me to create. I have to be honest, I am sweating out here in the sun, but it was just lovely to sit out here and chat with you. So if you enjoyed this episode, please let me know. I always love hearing from you. You can reply to any emails that you've received from me or you can DM directly on Instagram. I'm at hey, Steph Crowder. So I will see you next week. And until then, I am wishing you the courage and the clarity to go after what you love.