Chris: Welcome back to Conversations with My Night Brain. This is just a solo episode with my night brain. Except it actually isn't a night brain conversation. It was a 8:30 AM conversation that I had with a potential client who's now a former client, and I won't go into details, but just wanted to tell future me or maybe past me, I guess, who's listening to this in the past, that it's okay if it doesn't quite work out with a client. No matter how very important person they may be.
It always sucks when things don't work out the way you were hoping they were going to. Particularly in a client service dynamic where it kind of feels like it's your own reputation and ability and just entire person on the line in the process. And, uh, when that doesn't work out, and especially when the history hasn't been there to back up the claims or the issues that are why you're being dropped by the client.
I've had it happen two, maybe three times in 10 plus years of owning my own business, and by all accounts, the hundreds of clients who have been happy and I've worked with successfully over many years, obviously outweigh those two or three. But as we know, as with comments on the internet and other things like that, the two or three bad ones kind of stick with you and make you question your entire identity.
So I'm just recording this conversation for myself, but also anybody else out there who recently has gone through, is about to go through, or will go through in the future, a conversation like this where it just doesn't seem to work out. And I want you, and me, to remember that it's okay to feel those emotions and walk through the, um, the sadness, or the hurt, the pain, the confusion, walk through that.
Uh, I would also say it's not essential to walk through those with the former client or potential client, whatever the dynamic is, try to do that with either internally, or with a journal, or with a friend, or a colleague. Process that part of it obviously not trying to reflect back on with the person who isn't wanting to work with you for whatever reason.
I will say it's okay to ask clarifying questions if there's lingering doubts, or even things that you want to improve about what you did or what they perceive as you doing wrong, that caused them to not wanna work with you anymore. They don't have to answer them, obviously, and depends on how the relationship ended or how well it was done or handled.
Obviously, if it's a toxic, abusive kind of thing, and that can happen in client service, uh, relationships, then you, you need to get out and walk away, and just delete all emails and make sure you get paid for your work. But, you can ask for ask questions of clarity and even where or why things went wrong. But also remember that if it's a relationship with somebody or a business where you can just kind of sense that maybe this isn't working out right.
There's, when you look back, there's signs, there's warning flags that you kind of ignored in the pursuit of either credibility with this person, money they were gonna pay you, or some combination of all the above, or you just needed a paycheck to pay for some food. It's okay that you missed those signs, but then just remember those and trust your gut in the next interaction with a potential client when those same kind of signs start popping up.
And let's face it, there are people who are just mean or dicks and don't know that they are mean or a dick. They might say things like, I'm not trying to be mean, or I'm not trying to be hurtful. But it's important to remember that whatever your intention is towards someone, if someone says to you, you've hurt me, or this is confusing and I'm feeling hurt by this situation, or the way that you've handled this, your intention doesn't really matter.
And this is the part that's for me in my own personal life when I'm reflecting on interactions with my kids, my spouse, friends and family around me, intention is great, but that does not replace what actually happened, and especially it does not replace how you made someone feel because of your actions, whether you intended to hurt them or not. If your natural response to someone saying that you hurt them in some way is to say, I didn't intend to hurt you.
I think you're starting down a path that I walk very well headfirst into, which is defensive response to someone being vulnerable with you. And I'm still learning this lesson because I just want you, the person I've hurt, to understand that that isn't what I meant to do. And I don't want you to feel bad because you're misunderstanding what I meant, and that's not what I intended to happen, and this isn't how I wanted this conversation to go.
All may be true from your perspective, but it's probably time to just shut up and listen, and possibly apologize, reflect, and apologize, so you know what you're apologizing for. But most importantly to listen. Okay, that's enough for this episode. Uh, just a brief word on this podcast and how I sort of see it fleshing out a bit as we go. It's gonna be something that I'm gonna do when I feel like I want or have reason to do an episode, not any sort of regular scheduled routine.
So I apologize if it messes up with your, your, uh, listening schedule and your routine for listening to a podcast. That's just how it needs to be for me, in terms of my own ability to record podcasts while also editing a bunch of other people's podcasts. And also the topics, my plan is to have the topics vary, obviously, depending on what is going on in my life, what I've dreamt about, and argued with that night before.
Or interviews and conversations I wanna have with people, uh, related to something that's completely, not even necessarily what's on your night brain, but that's kind of like the general framing of like, hey, person, what's bugging you? What's stuck in your brain? It could be good things, it could be bad things. Let's talk about it for 10 minutes, 45 minutes, 38 minutes, 67 minutes even. And see where we go.
Maybe we find some sort of common ground, some sort of resolution to the issue or the question or the problem you're struggling with or the thing you're excited about, or maybe we don't, and we'll come back in a few episodes and talk about it again. So for whatever reason you're interested in either me or thoughts I have, or maybe there's a guest that I talk with that makes you wanna subscribe to the show and you've come back and re-listened to this old episode.
Either way, thank you for listening and, uh, look forward to whatever comes next from my Night Brain.