The Transparent Hypnotist

Photograph by Jim Frazier

The rant begins with a tired looked, perhaps a sigh, and the door opens.

“I don’t want to have an email conversation. I want to have a telephone conversation,” she says looking at me in earnest. I nod and wait for her to continue.

“What is wrong with picking up the phone and using your voice? It is so hard to communicate everything with an email.” She cracks open the seal on her bottled water and drinks for a moment. I wonder if she is using this as a break to gain momentum. Her black-eye-lined eyes flash at me.

But she is not upset with me. This is not a gripe against my methods of out-of-office communications (though I have to admit the phone call leading up to this session was one in which I myself would have preferred email). She has come to me to see if she can get to the heart of why she feels bound to unsuccessful habits and change them into more productive ones.

She is a free-lance graphic artist and she cannot seem to get beyond the hand-to-mouth style of life and is frustrated by it. She does not have an internet connection at her house. She goes to a local coffee shop to check her email three to four times a week. However, it seems that all her potential clients (advertising agencies and such) rather like to communicate via email. She will call them to a ask a question about a job only to get their voice mail and an email response five minutes later. When she asks them about this, they always tell her that they are too busy to take a phone call and the information is in the email.

The truth is, I could easily take their side. When I have people doing work for me, I tend to be the same way - unless the information I feel they need is better being said in person. However, when working with clients and potential referrers, that requires a whole different approach. It takes a little finesse to try to understand everyones preferred method of communication. I have some clients who only want to deal with me on the phone or in person. Other’s only want email. When it comes to the people who pay your meal ticket, I feel they deserve some consideration (within reason).

In my client’s case, she has very few repeat customers because though they like her work, she has been labeled hard to work with since she does not answer email in a timely matter and is also clingy. She has heard this repeatedly. Though she is still in the “I” stage (wanting everything to be on her terms), she has begun to see that it is not working so well. Even though she tells her clients upfront about her lack of internet, this does not really help when there are ten other people who want the work, have the talent and skills, and internet to boot.

As we are still in the process of working with her mindset, I cannot say how the sessions are working out, but I still thought this was an attitude issue worth sharing. It is not a unique problem and from my end, it seems so simple - get internet (or a cell phone that allows you to receive email). Problem solved. But it never is that simple when it is your problem.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 at 6:56 am and is filed under Client Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.