When Not to Work with a Client
Uncommon guidance for casual & professional readers, spiritual practitioners, healer types, and holistic facilitators
Are you an energy worker or spiritual practitioner? Maybe periodically read tarot cards just for friends? Life coach or healer type? Or offer wise counsel but never for money?
If yes, this piece may be well suited to you, dear Reader, and it may even be so too if you do none of those things.
Whether you are one who casually offers skills and natural talents to friends and family, or one who holds a private practice within your community, I’d like to offer what has seemingly become some rather uncommon guidance. Particularly so, for those of us who work with an alternative healing modality or in a spiritual capacity, and especially so, for any of us wishing to help safeguard against burnout or maintain optimal energetic hygiene.
Generally, practitioners, healer types, life coaches, spiritualists, holistic mentors, energy workers, ceremonialists, and various service providers are encouraged to become very clear on who our ideal audience is. If our practice or skills are shared with others in a less formal capacity, we might have never considered those we work with as a client, let alone who we might fit best with, or in this case… who we don’t fit with.
On the business side of things, it is common for self-employed facilitators to be told to find their niche, map out who their ideal clientele is, and to plan for a trajectory of increase. Standard entrepreneurial advice is to calculate how much our time is worth, and then consider each hour not spent developing our career as dollars lost.
On the spiritual and holistic community side of things, we are often prompted to ensure that we are being of service to others. Sometimes even being told that a practitioner must help everyone who asks it of them. That for one reason or another, it is our duty to accept each healing or support request that is made to us.
With so much of our collective attention focused on who to work with, many of us haven’t given much thought to who not to work with. Add in the very real push to accept every potential request, be constantly working, and to always be expanding, and we may find there is little guidance around recognizing deleterious client/practitioner conditions, when it is best for us not to work, and how to implement healthful boundaries to protect our work/life balance.
This concept of when not to work is one of the most important teachings that I have received over the years, and when I have brought it up with other facilitators it often occurs to them as a new thought. One that suddenly seems like such an obvious consideration that they wonder why it hadn’t come up in awareness sooner. In hindsight, the answers might turn out to be equally obvious too, but in-the-moment, when we are under the weight of societal expectations and with survival needs pressing on us - it’s right then, when our clarity becomes muddled, doubts have crept in, or our boundaries are being challenged that we appreciate having developed this criteria the most.
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