06/12/2022
'tis the season. Try to play nice.
It doesn't only happen in retail...
Recently, a potential new client, let’s call her Katherine, decides to book herself in for a Complimentary Consultation. At the allotted time, I am having a conversation with my colleague, in my treatment room, and as the minutes tick over I’m thinking that Katherine may be a no show. Haven’t had one of those in a long while…
At 10.25 am my phone rings and an indignant Katherine is on the line, huffily telling me she’s my 10.15. I ask her if she’s running late, she snorts that she’s in Sydney, and was waiting for me to call her! I tell her politely, I’m confused, and ask her why she thought I would be calling her? ‘For my free session’ she almost shouts with no small measure of derision.
I tell her I don’t offer telephone or online services to Australian clients, and ask her was she intending to travel to where I am located for her sessions if she were to go ahead?
Katherine is barely concealing her passive aggression now and proceeds to berate me that nowhere on my website does it say I do not offer telehealth services, and I reply that nowhere on my website does it say that I do. Instead, I draw to her attention that the booking email she received does not contain any details about who will contact whom for online or telephone consultations, and that it does cover attendance in person information.
Exasperated, Katherine loudly declares running a business this way is ‘utterly ridiculous in this day and age’ and hangs up. My colleague, who is still standing in my room, looks at me wide eyed and shakes his head. I laugh, long and loud, because you Katherine, have tripped yourself up, being more fixated on my business model, rather than explaining how I can assist you to combat your problem.
This tells me you are probably a fellow therapist, most likely a hypnotherapist, your business is not thriving, and you are seeking, covertly, to benefit from my hard work, in the style of a parasite. So, I do what any curious person would do, and Google her. And there she is, in all her intuition and heartfelt gratitude, on her hypnotherapy website, and outright whining about a lack of clients on her business page. I wonder if an undercurrent of deceit may have something to do with her situation?
Now I know times are tough for many of us right now, but experienced natural therapists, and other sole traders, are used to surfing the waves of economic fear, and we’ve learned to adapt, improvise, and ultimately overcome. Or we go under. We know that the stream sometimes fills your cup, and at other times it fills your bucket, or bathtub. We also know that adjusting to the current economic climate takes work, and often comes with a financial cost, and we get on with it.
So, when someone, like Katherine, comes to the table with an intention to wilfully deceive, I direct that energy right back to its source. Sadly, I’ve encountered her kind many times before, offering soapbox sermons of love and light, and vehemently denouncing those very behaviours she’s just exhibited.
I’ll never understand why so many in healing professions are so lacking in compassion for others. There’s no need to pretend to be a potential client to try to rip off the fruits of my hard work. Many of my counterparts will tell you that I give freely of my time and knowledge, and that a simple email asking for a conversation would have ended much differently.
Nevertheless, we all choose the paths that we take, and we reap the fruits of those seeds we have sown. And maybe in hindsight, when she reads this, she will come to understand that screeching at me about my business model is, in my humble opinion, simply absurd. It is after all, MY business.
