Dealing with difficult clients: the secret to being resilient

In many roles, difficult clients and customers can be hard to deal with.  They can trigger all sorts of responses in us.  My own experience is mostly from law and HR clients, but the issues are often the same for many other adviser and service provider roles. 

Wherever our role brings us into contact with helping clients who face a challenging situation and who expect us to have all the answers, there is the chance that strong emotions will be present at various stages.  And we need to be ready and able to deal with them when they turn up. 

Being aware of what’s going on is enormously helpful in us, as advisers, remaining resilient and continuing to enjoy our work. But if left unnoticed, it can grind us down.

Emotional transfer

Our client’s difficult emotions don’t just remain with our clients.  The nature of the adviser role is that, like it or not, our client’s emotions leap across the meeting room table, the phone call or even the email, and land in our own laps too. 

Appreciating that this ‘transfer’ of emotions from our clients to us takes place is the first step in us getting better at handling them. 

Sometimes these emotions are hidden.  It’s usually obvious when talking to a client who is clearly upset, distressed or fearful that this is their emotional state.  You know where you are in these situations.  But with others, especially corporate clients, the client contact you’re working with will usually maintain a professional calm and yet underneath they could be experiencing a whole range of strong emotions.  These might be emotions that they are not even aware they are experiencing, because the busy-ness of their role and their professional pride doesn’t make it comfortable for them to look there too much. 

This is important, because if we end up having strong emotions transferred to us but we’re not aware of what they are or the fact that they have been picked up by us, that is not a comfortable place for us to be.  This hidden process may leave us tired, annoyed, sometimes angry and sometimes anxious.  And these weren’t even our own emotions in the first place!  We’ve had them unwittingly dumped on us. 

This emotional transfer or dumping process usually takes place outside of our awareness.  Neither we nor our client is aware of it happening, unless we’ve trained ourselves to do so. 

The antidote

Understanding what is going on here is, in my view, an enormously powerful step in advisers gaining more resilience, reducing their stress and enjoying their work more.  I’ve been able to do it in my own legal practice and it’s made the world of difference for me. 

I can help you learn to spot it and deal with it.  To see the situation occurring and either to politely decline to accept the emotional transfer or at least to quickly shake it off and significantly reduce its negative impact on you. 

This is a theme I’m going to develop in several blogs, given its importance and benefits.  I will look at the most common emotions that clients bring to their communications with us, such as distress, anger and confusion.  We will also look at how these can come from superficially calm corporate clients too, just in a more hidden way. 

What’s going on here?

In this first blog, I will outline some of the psychological processes that tend to take place in these client communications.  You might be interested in the theory, but it’s also simply useful to know what’s going on at a practical level, to help you be more compassionate towards your client and towards yourself. 

The Contagion effect

Put very simply, both positive and negative emotions are infectious.  If you’ve ever heard someone really laughing, you can find yourself laughing too, even if you missed hearing the joke, you’ll know what I mean.  And if you find yourself with someone sad, the chances are that you will pick up some of that sadness too. We evolved as social beings and it’s natural. 

We’re all used to this and usually we’re (at least partially) aware it’s happening, so it tends to be easier to spot and easier to deal with. 

Counter-transference

Counter-transference takes place at a deeper, unseen level and is more complicated.  Put really simply, this is where we, as an adviser, can unwittingly find we’ve ended up being given some of our client’s feelings in a professional setting.  Imagine the client throwing you a ball and you catching it during your conversation.  Imagine that ball is full of difficult emotions.  Imagine that neither you or the client realise what’s just happened, because it’s happened outside your awareness.  

Counsellors and psychotherapists are trained in spotting and understanding this process, but the rest of us are not. It can be really helpful to understand it and spot it in action. 

Common examples are:

• You come away from a client conversation feeling low, sluggish, perhaps a bit useless.  You weren’t feeling this before the conversation.  Chances are that your client has handed over some of their own difficult feelings here to you. 

• You try to help a client understand a complex issue – in my legal work, it’s usually trying to explain a legal issue or the strategy in a Tribunal case.  But you end up feeling confused and uncertain.  You may stumble in your explanation or find your conversation going round in circles.  Chances are that your client was the one originally experiencing the confusion and uncertainty, and now some of this has rubbed off on you.

• Your client has been demanding and difficult in a phone call or email.  This is likely to be because they are angry and/or distressed.  You find yourself angry or distressed yourself, at some level.  A common example is where you find yourself (or see a colleague) coming off a call ranting “Oh, give me a break!  Why can’t clients just….??!!” 

You can probably spot the theme here: these are emotions that weren’t the adviser’s before they spoke to their client, but now the adviser has been lumbered with them. 

In future blogs I will develop these points and share some tips for spotting what’s going on and how to protect yourself from the effects. 

I truly believe that this is an important key in being resilient, calm and being able to enjoy your role far more. 

If any of this really resonates with you, do come and have a chat with me…