Transcript
00:00:05 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’m Joanna Lindenbaum, a coach, ritualist, and all-around transformation nerd who is obsessed with helping clients go deep to create more change and results with their clients.
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I created the Coaching Revolution podcast to share with you coaching skills, tips, and advice, as well as a deeper understanding of human behavior and of yourself.
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so that you can do even better client work and group work, grow your business organically, and know that you’re making a real difference in the world.
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This is about creating a revolution in the transformational industry so that more practitioners feel amazing about what they do and so that more of our clients experience life-changing shifts.
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Let’s get started.
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Welcome back.
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I am so glad you’re here.
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And I wanna open today’s episode with a story about a client of mine.
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I’m gonna keep her anonymous, but she’s given me full permission to share this story.
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So when this client first came to me, she was several years into her coaching practice.
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She was smart.
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She was highly skilled.
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She had done a lot of her own inner work already.
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And she was also and is, she’s just a caring, caring person and deeply committed to her clients.
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She’s totally the kind of practitioner that anyone would be lucky to work with.
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And all at the same time, she came to me because she had a problem that she couldn’t quite figure out.
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So she had a client, a long-term client who had gotten into the habit of canceling or rescheduling sessions at the very last minute.
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We’re talking sometimes just hours or even minutes before a session was set to begin.
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And this last minute canceling, rescheduling, it had been going on for months.
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It wasn’t every session, but it was
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almost like every other session this was happening.
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And every time that it happened, my client would accommodate her client.
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She’d say, of course, no problem, let’s find another time.
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She’d reschedule.
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And again, she’d hold a new slot for this client and show up prepared.
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And yet the client would still reschedule.
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Every time that this happened, something kind of tightened inside of my client.
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But she didn’t say anything.
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She didn’t review her scheduling policies and institute some kind of policy like you need to reschedule within 24 hours or else you still pay or pay partially.
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She didn’t even let herself fully feel how much all of the last minute rescheduling was bothering her.
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Because in her mind, she was a caring, ethical practitioner and good practitioners shouldn’t get angry, shouldn’t get resentful about these kinds of things, right?
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And then one day, the client rescheduled again.
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And it was a reschedule of a session that was already rescheduled.
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And something in my client just kind of snapped.
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She wrote a note to the client that she immediately regretted.
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It wasn’t outright cruel, but it was sharp.
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And it had the subtle energy of shaming her client for all of
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the rescheduling.
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This note kind of came out with an edge that my client didn’t recognize in herself.
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And at some point in her note, she even did something that she knew was unethical.
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She compared this client to all her other clients who were always on time, right?
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And comparing your clients to others is a big no-no in terms of shame and in terms of ethics in the container.
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Her client
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was taken aback.
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And my client was mortified.
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She came to me to start working together right after all of this happened because she really couldn’t understand how this happened.
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This wasn’t who she was.
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She had always been the opposite of this, gentle.
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and accommodating and always, always putting the client first.
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So how did this happen?
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Where did this come from?
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Well, here’s what we found when we looked underneath it all together.
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There was a part of her, a very real and very legitimate part of her that knew she deserved to have her time honored.
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that knew that her work had value.
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And that part of her also honestly felt angry, angry that this client kept treating their sessions as kind of optional, even though my client was showing up fully prepared every single time and ready to give so much.
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And that angry part
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she had put it completely into shadow because she thought that she needed to be nice and nice meant not setting any boundaries.
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She put her anger into shadow because she had a deep, unexamined belief in there that setting a boundary meant hurting someone or upsetting someone or having them leave her and go away.
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She also believed that practitioners needed to always go with what’s working for the client, even on the business end of things.
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That as a practitioner, she didn’t get to have needs inside of the container.
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That any impulses she had to, that she had to set boundaries with clients were maybe a bad thing.
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Something to be contained or managed or hidden.
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And so my client hid those impulses, not just from her client, but from herself.
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She hid the impulse to set better boundaries with this client around scheduling.
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She did this for months and she thought she was doing the right thing, or at least she was thinking she was doing the safe thing.
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But the shadow expressed itself because it always eventually does.
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The only
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thing it can do is express itself at some point after it’s been suppressed and suppressed and suppressed for that long.
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And usually it comes out sideways.
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It comes out kind of like in an accident or a flash in a way that feels completely out of character, just like that shaming note that this client sent.
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So she and I did the work together.
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We unpacked the situation.
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We looked at where all of the beliefs came from.
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And then we did the deeper, harder, courageous work.
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We helped her actually own the part of herself that felt anger and that sometimes even felt rage.
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And when I say we did the work for this to own it, I’m not talking about a nice, gentle empowerment exercise in order to own your anger.
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I’m talking about deeply and sacredly confronting and learning to really accept that she has anger, she has rage.
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It’s a part of who she is.
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And we worked on this cognitively, somatically, emotionally, and spiritually so that she could finally take back this part of herself that she had been denying her whole life, that she had been ashamed of her whole life.
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And together we worked to help her own her anger.
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not so that she would take more rageful action, like what happened accidentally with her client, but so that she wouldn’t continue to accidentally let the anger out in ways that she couldn’t control and in ways that were sabotaging to her and harmful to others.
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We worked together so that she could not only understand and own the anger and the need to set boundaries, but also she ultimately saw that this anger carried some gifts for her if she would be willing to be with it, if she would be willing to let it inform her instead of control her.
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And on the other side of all of that work that we did together, here’s what happened.
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First of all, she created a rescheduling policy for all of the clients in her practice.
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It was clear, it was fair, it was warm, but it was a rescheduling policy and it honored her time and her clients time.
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Now her clients need to give her 24 hours notice.
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And if they don’t, if they
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cancel last minute or want to reschedule last minute, they still pay for the session.
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Unless, of course, it’s a true emergency.
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So she upholds this policy, but not with rigidity.
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She upholds it with ease and with warmth and with love.
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Because now it comes from a place that’s integrated instead of a place that’s suppressed.
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And as an aside, this rescheduling policy also happens to be really important for her client’s growth and transformation.
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While she thought that she was doing her clients a favor by letting them reschedule and reschedule, the truth is that it was creating a loose and leaky container.
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It was allowing her client to be in resistance on action and inner work.
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Now with the new rescheduling policy, it leaves less leeway for this client’s fear to get in the way of showing up for the session.
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Now, because I want you to see the full picture, what I also want you to know is as I worked with this client, we also worked together on how to repair the rupture that had been created when she sent that note.
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to her client because that really matters as well.
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And I coached her to have a conversation with her client where she took full responsibility, not in a shameful way, but where she took responsibility in a way of self-love
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and compassion and love and compassion for her client as well.
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And even though it was a challenging conversation, she had to put her big girl panties on for it.
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Her and her client came through it.
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And she’s still working with that client.
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And that client is very happy in the work and not canceling sessions last minute.
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So I’m telling you this story because I think it illustrates something that
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I see constantly when I start training practitioners.
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The practitioners who care the most, the ones who are the most ethical, the ones who are the kindest, they are sometimes the ones who are also the most at risk for what I’m going to call
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the nice practitioner trap.
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And I want to name exactly what that nice practitioner trap is, how it gets created, and how it might be showing up for you in ways that are costing you in your business and in your client work.
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But real quick, before we go any further, if you haven’t yet, hit subscribe wherever you’re listening to this podcast so that you can get notifications and never miss a new episode.
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Okay, so let me first say something important here.
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There is nothing, absolutely nothing wrong with being a kind, caring, ethical practitioner.
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generous practitioner.
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That’s exactly who I am as a coach and a practitioner.
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And that’s exactly the type of students that I draw.
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And being kind, caring, ethical, generous, that’s not the trap here.
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The trap is when niceness stops being a value
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and it starts being a defense mechanism.
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So when niceness is being used to protect you from something, that’s often a trap.
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When niceness is, you’re using niceness to keep you from being seen a certain way, that’s usually a trap.
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It’s not going to work out for you.
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When you use niceness to hold on to clients no matter what the cost is to you, even if they keep on rescheduling last minute, that’s where the trap is.
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I’m talking about when being nice kind of becomes no longer a choice in your mind and in your body.
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Instead, it becomes a compulsion that you get pulled into over and over again
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even when your boundaries are being crossed.
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And here’s what makes it all so tricky.
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Being nice can look so virtuous from the outside, and it can feel so virtuous from the inside.
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You’re thoughtful.
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You’re generous.
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You’re not one of those coaches with such rigid business rules who only cares about yourself or the bottom line, right?
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Niceness can feel like, oh my gosh, of course this is doing the right thing until the resentment builds and builds and builds because you keep on giving too much of yourself, right?
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And then maybe you snap in one way or another.
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Or your client senses kind of that edginess or the undercurrent in what you’re saying that’s maybe subtly shaming them.
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Or maybe the resentment never shows itself on the outside, but instead you turn that resentment on yourself.
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You get increasingly critical of yourself about
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what you’re being nice for or what’s happening.
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You get more angry at yourself.
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Or maybe you just end up feeling utterly exhausted from not having boundaries.
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All of this is when niceness has crossed into shadow.
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So let me get even more specific.
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and give you some other examples of how the nice practitioner trap can show up, both in your business or in your practice.
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It can show up in lots of different ways.
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Here are just a few examples.
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So maybe you don’t raise your rates.
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Maybe you’ve got a client who has been working with you for a long time and you just never raise your rates because some part of you has decided
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that charging more is taking advantage of people.
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And so you stay at a rate that made sense two years ago or four years ago, and you tell yourself it’s because it’s unethical to charge more when really somewhere underneath raising your rates feels like it puts you in the category of those practitioners.
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I’m saying those with air quotes here.
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the ones who prioritize money over service.
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And by the way, this particular example has been a biggie for me personally.
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From day one of starting my business, raising rates for me has had lots of moral attachments and of course, lots of fears, fears of
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If I raise my rates, will people stay with me?
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Will they really buy?
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And when I say those moral attachments, if I raise my rates, what does it mean about me?
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Does it mean that I’m just money hungry, et cetera.
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But the more over the years that I worked on both the fears and the shadow, the more that I’ve moved then into charging rates that are actually really aligned for me.
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My rates are definitely nowhere near the highest in the industry, especially for all of the experience that I bring.
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But I can honestly say that I’m not undercharging anymore.
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The rates that I charge are right for me.
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They’re not driven by fears or by shadows.
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Okay.
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I digressed a little bit.
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Let me give you some other examples of the nice practitioner trap.
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So here’s another one.
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Maybe for you, soften your marketing until the marketing just doesn’t even say anything at all.
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You hedge on your opinions.
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You strip out anything that sounds too confident because you’re worried that confidence reads as arrogance.
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Or maybe
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You have a belief that taking authority in your expertise somehow feels manipulative or like you’re taking power over.
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But here’s what happens.
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You don’t put your expertise strongly into your marketing.
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You don’t put your strong opinions into your marketing and then ideal clients scroll past.
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They just don’t even pay attention to it.
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Not because your work isn’t
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really good and extraordinary.
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But because your messaging doesn’t really draw those ideal clients in to pay attention and to really feel it and to feel you.
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Maybe for you, the nice practitioner trap shows up by not following up after sales conversations because following up feels pushy.
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And you will not be pushy.
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You’ve made that decision inside of yourself.
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Nice practitioners definitely aren’t pushy.
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Even when the person on the other end of that conversation was actually genuinely interested.
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You decide that you’re not going to follow up.
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It’s too pushy even.
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when actually a warm, caring check-in with that prospect would be exactly what the prospect needed to feel seen and to say yes to you.
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Maybe for you, the nice practitioner trap shows up because you let clients miss payments and miss payments and you keep on showing up for their sessions anyway and you don’t really do anything about it because it feels like saying something about their payments or doing something like pausing sessions until they can pay.
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You just believe that it’s unkind.
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But underneath any of these scenarios,
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There’s something in one way or another that’s kind of running in the background.
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It’s if I take up too much space, or if I advocate for myself, or if I ask for what I need, or if I set a boundary, I’m going to hurt someone.
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I’m going to cause pain, or I’m going to end up alone.
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And of course, the nice practitioner can also show up
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We just spoke about some business examples, but it can also show up inside of your coaching sessions or your groups.
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So for example, you’re in a session and with a client and you see it clearly, you see the pattern.
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that’s going on for them so clearly.
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And maybe you feel the next question forming, the one that is going to actually crack something open on the pattern for this client.
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But then all of a sudden you pull back.
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You ask something much softer, much safer, much easier.
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You tell yourself that your client isn’t ready or that you don’t want to push or offend and then you just move on to something else.
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But if you’re honest,
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maybe that pullback was about you, not really about your client, about not wanting to be the person who pushed too far.
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Now, of course, we also need the transformational skills, the trauma-informed skills to be able to ask edgy questions
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in ways that are going to land well in someone’s system, in ways that are going to allow your client full freedom and agency to disagree.
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That goes without saying.
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In Sacred Depths, we call this the skill of reflecting hard truths.
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But what I’m talking about here is not that.
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It’s when niceness and the clinging on to being nice
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gets in the way of the bold question, the question that is the exact one that your client is ready for.
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And then if you hold back on that question, you don’t end up cracking open what’s ready to crack open.
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You stay on the surface.
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Yeah, the session is fine.
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Your client leaves feeling okay, maybe with some great new awarenesses and action steps, but not with deeply integrated new awareness or movement on the actual pattern that’s holding her back.
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Here’s another example of how a nice practitioner can show up in sessions.
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Maybe a client comes to you with something really emotionally big.
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Let’s say
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For example, her fear got in the way of a presentation that she had, and then she kind of really bombed the presentation.
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It did not go well, like objectively.
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The presentation did not go well.
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She bombed it.
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And now she’s mortified.
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She’s really upset.
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Well, when nice practitioner takes over,
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Instead of you staying present with your client’s discomfort, instead of you really sitting in it with your client, instead, you find yourself moving towards resolution a little too quickly, or offering a reframe a little too quickly, or trying to help your client feel better, right?
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You’re being nice instead of being deeply present.
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The thing is sometimes staying in the discomfort is exactly the work.
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And moving too quickly towards relief is actually going to rob your client of the experience they need of feeling the discomfort.
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So these are some of the costs
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of the nice practitioner trap when it shows up in your client sessions.
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It’s not that the sessions are bad necessarily, but when nice is leading the way, the sessions are just kind of chronically a little too safe, a little too protective of your client’s comfort and of your own.
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And in one way or another, your client eventually is going to feel it, even if they can’t name it.
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They will feel it.
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They are going to know that on some level, that there’s a deeper level available that they’re just not quite getting to.
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And over time, that’s going to translate into them not moving forward in the ways that they want to move forward, into not renewing with you, into not referring.
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So
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I know that might sound a little harsh, but I’m sharing it because I want you to know that your niceness doesn’t ultimately serve your client and it doesn’t ultimately serve you or your business.
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So let’s pause here.
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I want to invite you to ask yourself honestly, where are the places in your business or in your client work
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where you’re being nice instead of being in your leadership.
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And I’m asking you this question, my friend, not so that you criticize yourself at all.
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I’m asking you for self-awareness.
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Where are the places in your business or in your client work where you’re being nice instead of being in your leadership?
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Because
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Naming it for yourself with love and self-compassion, that’s the first step towards changing it, right?
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We have to be able to name it.
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And I’ll share with you, because this may be helpful for you to know, if you are noticing that nice has been leading the way as a defense mechanism in your business or in your client work, you’re not alone.
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This is very common.
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That’s why I’m sharing this podcast episode.
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And by the way, it’s especially common for women.
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It’s because of how women are socialized.
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And I know not all of my community are women, but there’s a lot of women in my community.
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And so if that’s you, know that a piece of this is because of how we’ve been socialized.
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And also please know I’ve been there
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Right there with you.
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And every now and again, if I’m not on top of my own inner work, I still slip into the nice practitioner every now and again, right?
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So you’re in good company, my friend.
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So, okay.
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How does the nice practitioner trap actually form inside of you?
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Well, it can form lots of different ways, of course, but almost always it starts with witnessing or experiencing someone who used their authority or their direct truth telling in ways that caused harm.
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Maybe it was a parent who was uber rigid and too harsh, or maybe it was a teacher who was humiliating, or maybe it was a coach or a mentor who pushed too hard or told their truth in a way that landed harmfully or, you know, just not well.
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Maybe you witnessed
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someone having really harsh boundaries, rigid boundaries in ways that hurt others.
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And because you witnessed this, somewhere inside of you, made kind of a contract with yourself, probably without even realizing it.
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And the contract that you made is, I will never be that person.
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I will never make someone feel the way
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that I was made to feel.
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I will never use my authority to harm.
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I will always lead with kindness, always.
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Now, I want to say this clearly.
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Those intentions are sacred, and they’re so important.
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But if they were formed,
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in reaction to pain, if they were formed from a place of fear instead of from a grounded, integrated sense of who you are, then it can kind of overshoot or overfunction.
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And then what happens is it doesn’t just mean I won’t be cruel.
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It ends up meaning I won’t set any limits.
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I won’t ever push.
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I won’t ever name the uncomfortable thing.
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I’ll never ask for what I need if I sense it makes someone else uncomfortable.
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Or I won’t let myself feel anger because anger is what harmful people feel.
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And so what happens inside of that is that natural, normal, vital parts of yourself
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the part that knows what it needs, the part that can hold a boundary, the part that can name a hard truth with love, those parts get pushed into shadow.
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And anything pushed into shadow, it doesn’t disappear.
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It still wants to be expressed.
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It just has to find another way out.
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Okay, so here’s the thing.
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The answer to the nice practitioner trap definitely is not to become harsh or to start pushing clients around or saying every hard thing that crosses your mind.
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The solution is not to have harsh protocols and policies that don’t allow for some flexibility and general human error or messiness.
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No, the answer is to work
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with what’s actually in shadow, to work with the parts of yourself that you’ve disowned, that you’ve decided are bad or wrong or harmful, and to work to reclaim them so that you have the superpower of them for yourself and so that you can use that superpower responsibly.
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So the shadow might be anger, for example.
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Not always, but often the superpower inside of anger is aligned boundaries.
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The shadow might be power.
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Not always, but often the superpower inside of it is incredible leadership, starting with your own agency and self-leadership.
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Maybe for you the shadow is selfishness.
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And the superpower inside of selfishness is maybe learning to take better care of yourself.
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Maybe for you, the shadow is judgment.
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And oftentimes the superpower inside of judgment is having impeccable discernment and then making decisions that are aligned all around.
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So those are just some examples.
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And when you do the actual shadow work on this, big things start to shift.
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You stop confusing niceness with safety.
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with safety either for yourself or your clients.
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When you do the actual shadow work, you start understanding that real service, really serving someone else, supporting someone else, sometimes looks like saying the hard thing or holding the line or charging what actually feels fair for your time and energy or naming the pattern.
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And when you do this, when you work with your shadows, you’re 100 times less likely to have the shadow leak out in ways that sabotage you or harm others, right?
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Just like that client who inadvertently told off and shamed her client for rescheduling so many times.
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The practitioners
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And I’ve been doing this for decades, supporting practitioners on Shadow, the practitioners that I’ve supported on this work, the ones that really do it, not just intellectually, but do the somatic and energetic work involved.
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They market differently.
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They sell differently.
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They show up in sessions differently and they navigate their businesses differently.
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And
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more often than not, they become such better practitioners.
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The kinds of practitioner that clients talk about for years.
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And it’s because they held better, tighter containers.
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It’s because they stopped holding back and it’s because they started being more authentic.
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So if you heard yourself somewhere in this episode,
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in the rescheduling that you’ve let slide, in the rate that you haven’t raised, in the sessions that you’re keeping too safe.
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If you walk away with nothing else, I want you to walk away with this.
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There is nothing wrong with you.
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Nothing.
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You are incredible.
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And the niceness, it’s not a character flaw.
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It’s not evidence that you’re not cut out for this work or that you’re not cut out to lead a sustainable business.
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It’s actually, in a way, evidence of exactly how much you care.
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It’s just that your beautiful values of kindness and generosity somewhere along the way got tangled up with old fears or parts of yourself that you’ve put in shadow.
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That tangle, that’s what’s been running the show.
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And all of this can be worked with.
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You don’t have to tiptoe around clients if they’re prickly inside of sessions.
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You don’t have to stop yourself from reflecting a hard truth to a client when you sense it can really change something for them.
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You don’t have to avoid sitting in the discomfort with clients or even you don’t have to avoid leading clients into some discomfort sometimes.
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Because the truth is that the most effective, the most masterful practitioners, they know the difference between leading a client into discomfort
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versus leading them into pain.
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And the most masterful practitioners recognize that sometimes discomfort, sometimes really feeling the tension on something, or even a client feeling ever so slightly triggered, that’s not a bad thing.
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That’s what can actually lead your client to growth and change.
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You also don’t have to twist yourself into a pretzel and feel resentful if a client has ongoing scheduling issues or payment issues, or if a client expects you to be responding to multiple emails every day of the week.
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You don’t have to hold back on being bold in your marketing out of fear of offending other people.
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And you don’t have to stop yourself
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from following up with a prospect who’s shown interest.
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Now, of course, you want to do all of these things with precise skill.
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And you want to do all of these things ethically so that you don’t abuse power.
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And it all starts with your inner work, like we say inside of sacred depths and advanced depth.
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Before we even get to skill or technique, it starts with energetics, right?
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With your energetics as the practitioner.
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In this case, untangling your own fears and shadows that are keeping you nice.
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And all of this that we’re talking about is exactly the kind of work that we go into inside of the advanced depth shadow journey.
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We do real shadow work in there, not the surface level kind.
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We look directly at the parts of yourself that you’ve put into shadow.
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And then we do the actual work of bringing them back into integration so that your ethics and your edge can coexist, so that your deep, deep care and kindness and your authority can live together.
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so that you can be fully, deeply, boldly yourself in your business and in your client work without doing harm.
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As always, thank you for being here and truly thank you, thank you for being here.
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I mean that every single time.
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If you enjoyed this episode, please give it a five star review.
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and hit subscribe so that you don’t miss any upcoming episodes.
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If you have a friend or a colleague that you know would love this episode or this podcast, please share it with them.
00:40:53 Joanna Lindenbaum
You are my best way of getting out the word on all of these important topics that we talk about here.
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So again, thank you.
00:41:03 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’ll drop, if you’re interested in advanced depth, I’ll drop those links in the show notes and I’ll see you next time.
