Working with Tough Clients

I have a tough client right now! Not a resistant one, not a mean one, not a confused one. She’s TOUGH, as in she has a bit of a hard shell and a bit of a disdainful tone (she’s also confident, competent, and caring). She uses my name in a very intense way: “I don’t understand why everything needs to fit on an arc, NADIA,” or “I have twenty years of experience as a consultant, NADIA.” I’m finding that the best way to work with her is to have absolutely no reaction to her pushiness and put downs, but instead to give her lots of space to talk and she usually comes around to a kind of open-minded ambivalence, which allows me to put in my two cents. There are a lot of other dynamics in the scenario, which are not the subject of this chronicle, but I thought it would be interesting to reflect a little on this toughness. 

One piece of feedback that I often hear from her is a kind of church-and-state separation between work and home. Now, as a long time community worker and an entrepreneur I don’t have a very strong dividing line here. With Dream a Dream we started about two or three years ago working with the notion of “professional love.” Which we needed to try to get away from the natural but problematic idea that “we feel like family” as we grow in emotional intelligence. Not only are families often fraught, we also didn’t want to get caught up in enmeshments that would make hierarchies and working relationships cloudy. Professional love is different. It’s more like asking with care “what is the overtone in this working environment?” From the little things, like making more coffee when it runs out, to bigger things like listening to understand when someone says something you disagree with. Professional love means that the wellbeing of people matters, that dialogue is always seeking resolution or innovation, that relationships are tended with care. One of my co-faciltiators, Andrew Kushnir, says: attunement is attention plus affection. This is professional love in a nut shell. My tough client has high attention but low affection. I can’t help but wonder, if the work environment that she is in most of the time was a little more loving, a little less sharply divided from “home” would she need to be so tough?