It’s quite natural that you love what you do to help your clients. People fall in love with modalities. I know I love the Sufi healing I’ve learned from my teachers, as well as so many little details about spiritual and practical business development.
I’ve been studying it all for 25 years, and I’m not bored yet!
This kind of love for what you do is common, but it leads to overwhelming clients. Because you, as the practitioner, tend to know so darn much about what you do, you want to be really complete in how you share it with your clients.
There is a good intention here! When folks do this, they don’t want them to suffer unnecessarily, or to miss anything. there is a desire to be complete in service to caring for people.
Here’s the challenge, though: clients rarely want to become practitioners of the modality.
One of the things to be honest about ourselves when we creating content for folks, in courses, or just simply in client education, is to ask whether we’re creating practitioner-level content, in terms of depth, breadth and completeness?
If the answer is yes, the correct response is to stop it!
Think about how long it takes to become a competent practitioner, in whatever modality. How many classes, how many months or years? How much practice?
To become truly competent often takes years.
Clients don’t want that. They don’t want anything like it.
Giving the minimum as an expression of care.
I want to suggest that you start giving WAY less. Not as a way to protect yourself, or to be miserly in expressing your gifts to people.
No, I want to encourage you to give way less as an expression of deep care, of real awareness of how much your clients can take in, how much they can process, and how much they can act on, when they don’t want to be practitioners themselves.
This requires clarity.
In order to carry this out, it requires taking a little time to get clear on what outcome you’re wanting for people, and a real awareness of what outcome they are wanting for themselves.
Then, if you think through what is the minimum I can give that will get them that outcome, that can be a guiding light for you in avoiding overgiving.
Take a moment now.
Think of one of your offers, either one you’ve already created, or one you’ve been dreaming of. Are you clear what the client/participant would want from this?
Once you are clear about that, and you have an awareness of how little capacity they might have to take in new information, process it, and act on it… what’s the minimum you have to do to help them get that outcome?
What do you notice? How does it feel to give less from a place of deep care?
with love,
Mark Silver, M.Div.
Heart of Business, Inc.
Every act of business can be an act of love.
