Episode 499 - Seven Types of Difficulties with Clients and How to Make the Best of Them

I don't think I've done one at all.

And if I have done one, I can't find what I've done before.

But I thought it was important that when you go into private practice, that you know how to deal with difficult clients.

Now there will always be what you might perceive as a difficult client and how you deal with a difficult client will be reflective of you your practice and zillions of other things and how you deal with customer complaints again is is reflective of you but also the most important part of your private practice Now I'm going to give you some examples as we go forwards and I also recommend, and this took me years to get around to doing it, I also recommend that you have a set of terms and conditions.

So we'll go through mine I'll read them out to you so you can get a flavour of what I consider is important but the important thing is what you might class as a difficult client probably isn't them being a pain in the bum just to give you a hard time what you might classify as a difficult client somebody else might think is a fab client.

So the other thing to think about is what do you classify as a difficult client? So the sort of areas of difficulties are clients that don't pay, clients that don't turn up, clients that are too demanding, clients that ask you to do something in a session that you probably don't want to do, clients that don't value you as a person and the services that you're offering.

So those that don't, so don't pay, don't turn up, are demanding, don't value.

And then you've also got people that will come for a session that have unrealistic expectations of what can happen in an astrological reading.

So people that expect you to predict when they're going to get married, how many children they're going to have, what job they're going to have for the rest of their lives, the incomes they're going to earn.

You know, those are completely unrealistic expectations.

Then there are the clients that want to be your friend.

And at the opposite end of the scale are clients that are so stressed with what's going on at the moment.

They're going to talk about suicidal thoughts.

threatening to kill themselves or whatever i don't actually classify that as a difficult client that's part and part of of running a private practice and i've covered suicide in episode first episode i covered it in was episode 52 and then i covered it episode 234 And then the final time I covered it, which I've called it, is possibly helping someone's dead.

And that's episode 474.

So I have covered suicide quite a bit.

So I don't consider suicide, talking about suicide, I don't consider that as a difficult client.

OK, because I don't know how long you've been in private practice, but I've been in private practice for 30 years and also been a therapist.

So I've come across quite a few clients.

difficult things and then the last one is on my list of seven I say this is the client that constantly changes their appointment now I use appointment software, but anyway, we're coming to how to deal with all of these things.

So we're saying that we've got seven things that could be classified as a difficult client.

The client that doesn't pay, the client that doesn't turn up, the client that's overly demanding in the session, the client that doesn't value whatever it is that you're offering them, the client that has unrealistic expectations, the client that wants to be friends forever and the client that is constantly changing their appointments.

So these are the seven things that I think would be classified as what we could term or I would term as a difficult client or difficulties with client.