Are you carrying your clients?

Over the past twenty years I’ve seen so many business owners who lose their passion for their work. They end up depleted, worn out, and lose their creativity.

There are lots of reasons that this can happen, and one of them has to do with carrying clients.

The problem with carrying clients

First off, when I say “carrying clients” I mean taking what I call an extraordinary amount of responsibility for their actions and outcomes.

I hope you know me well enough by now that I do NOT mean “not caring.” I don’t mean avoiding taking responsibility for the quality of your work, or for your part of client outcomes. We need to be responsible to them.

What I am talking about is that I watch especially newer business owners/practitioners take an extraordinary amount of responsibility for their clients. Worrying about whether they are following through, trying to hand-feed them. Making themselves available for client inquiries in the evenings and weekends, trying to make sure that any time a client says anything it gets responded to with a LOT of time and effort IMMEDIATELY.

Why is this a problem?

Practitioners who burden themselves and their heart’s capacity with unnecessary amounts of attention on their clients drain their ability to help their business develop capacity, to help feel joy.

It’s akin to the problem with helicopter parenting: not fun or useful for the parent or the child.

To start to shift this, I lean into two principles.

Principle One: Breaking binary thinking.

This toxic culture we live in teaches us all or nothing thinking. Either you are all over your clients, or you are neglecting them.

Nope. You can still be caring for someone while giving them space. You can still be caring for someone while caring for yourself. You can still be caring for them while trusting that they have what they need in the moment.

You can still be caring for someone, knowing they can make it on their own for a day or two.

Principle Two: People need space to struggle and fail in order to learn and grow.

If I spoon-feed my kids everything, they never really learn how to wrestle with something on their own.

Also, more critically, they never learn how to have their own relationship to whatever is we’re working with. Their own relationship to time. To food. To accountability.

There’s lots of times I’ve skipped breakfast because I wasn’t hungry- I can trust my kids when their bodies tell them they don’t want breakfast. There’s lots of times when I flexed or changed a commitment I had, being willing to face the consequences with someone, because I needed to do something else instead.

The same with clients. When you work with them, they need to be with whatever you’ve given them, to understand how it sits with them, to integrate at their own rate, to wrestle with concepts and practices you share with them.

I am in NO position to teach you how to do your thing: you’re in expert in your modality, or becoming one.

I do want to say, from a business perspective, that if you can trust your clients a bit more, then you can have more space for your own heart, and your own business.

What this can look like.

A client emails with a concern or challenge. They aren’t suicidal, there isn’t any immediate danger you are responsible for.

You could spend 20-30 minutes with their email giving them a complete answer.

OR… you could…

Put the email aside to answer tomorrow morning, dealing with all client emails at the same time, in a block of time dedicated to that, while still keeping your commitment to respond within 1-2 business days.

And then using the time you would have spent immediately answering the email instead working on your own marketing that you’ve been meaning to get to forever.

Even more important than the doingness.

The space and time you shift from your clients to your business is priceless. But even more than that is opening up space in your heart and mind for yourself and your business.

If you’re constantly occupied thinking/worrying/carrying your clients energetically, there is very little space left for receiving care for you and your own business.

If this issue has spoken to you, as a start, take just a minute or two and try this, right now.

Breathe. Feel the presence of your clients, of their hearts, and their needs, and their struggles. Then ask the Divine to show you, willing to be surprised, their capabilities, their strengths, their resilience.

As that comes in, filling your heart, then take one more step.

Take all of your clients, and place them in the hands of the Divine, into the care of the Source of Love, however you name the Mystery, the Oneness. Know in your heart that when you have a part to play in helping to care for them, the Divine will let you know. But give the overall responsibility for their care into the hands of the Divine, so that you aren’t unknowingly playing God by taking on complete responsibility for their wellbeing, which you can’t really have.

Breathe. Rest into that.

How does that feel? What do you notice?

Also: what does your business look like when your heart has more space to be with it?

With love,

Mark Silver, M.Div.
Heart of Business, Inc.
Every act of business can be an act of love.

P.S. Deadline for Pay from the Heart!

A week from this Friday, Nov. 8th, I’ll be in Baltimore teaching a day-long workshop that has three intentions:

• Help you claim a deep sense of sovereignty in your business.
• Understand the big picture of how businesses like yours succeed, and where yours is and what it needs.
• Dig into the nitty gritty of how to actually get things done.

It’s been priced at pay-from-the-heart. However, to honor the commitments necessary to put on a live workshop, we’re ending the pay from the heart pricing after tomorrow, Oct. 31.

We only do this because people wait until the deadline to sign up, and it’s not kind or helpful to our support folks to have a bunch of last minute registrations the night before. So this is an artificial deadline. I don’t want you to pay anything but pay from the heart.

So if you’re going to join me in Baltimore, register before end of the day tomorrow, October 31.

Take a look: Every act of business can be an act of love, Baltimore, November 8.