Four Steps For Working Effectively With A Difficult Client

For self-employed professionals and small business owners, difficult clients appear to be a fact of life.

You have doubtless heard people say things like, "Guess who I have to deal with today? Wish me luck."

You may even have found yourself saying something quite similar.

The assumption behind such sentiments is that there is something wrong with the client. The client is a difficult person.

But what if the client is not difficult at all?

What if the problem lies not with the client but with the interaction
between you?

What if the client is not better or worse than you but simply
different?

What if you could turn that client from someone you perceive as difficult into a valued partner?

It all begins with answering the all-important question, "What Colour Are You?"

iMA recognises that there are, in fact, four different types of people.

And once you know which of those four types you fall into and which one of these four groups the other person falls into - in this case, your client - then we can find a solution that is really going to work.

It's not a one-size-fits-all solution but rather a solution that will work for your particular situation, based on what iMA calls the "High Colour" that you have and the High Colour of the other person.

There are four High Colours altogether.

We call them High Red, High Yellow, High Green, and High Blue.

Why "High", by the way?

Because in reality, we're all a blend of colours.

Nobody falls directly into a category.

But our High Colour is what makes us the most comfortable, most of the time.

It's where our areas of brilliance come out most of the time.

iMA classifies them as High Red, High Yellow, High Green and High Blue. That's what it is that we are trying to discover.

I encourage you to download my free product in order to find out the detail of how this works - on what criteria iMA breaks the world's population into these four groups - these four High Colours.

The free download is a PDF which includes a link to a video. It will take you about 25 minutes or so to go through it.

The first step is finding out which colour you are.

That's the i in iMA - identify, identifying your High Colour.

That's the first step because you need to know who you are.

What is your comfort zone?

What is your mode of being that makes you the most comfortable most of the time?

To find out your High Colour, simply complete my free iMA Questionnaire

The second step is to identify the High Colour of the other person, of that difficult client.

And chances are you've got a colour clash.

That is why you are finding your client "difficult".

You and that person are finding it difficult to communicate, difficult to connect and therefore difficult to work together.

Once you've identified your High Colour and the High Colour of the other person, now you've got to make some changes in how you behave and how you communicate, in order to bridge that communication gap and thereby turn that difficult client into a cooperative partner.

That's where the M of iMA comes in.

M stands for Modify.

You have to modify the message.

You have to encode what you are wanting to say to that other person differently.

That's what I call "communicating on their wavelength and not yours”.

That is the key to dealing with difficult employees effectively. If you do this well, your will know longer consider your "difficult employees" to be difficult.

It's almost as if you have to speak in a different language.=

Let's say you are a High Green and your boss is a High Red. You have to learn how to speak "High Red Dialect".

You have to communicate with others on their wavelength in a way that they are going to be able to encode that message more effectively.

It's incredible the magic that can happen when you change your style of communication.

The other person suddenly realises that they understand you a lot better than they did before.

They feel as if somehow you are speaking to them and writing to them differently in your emails. They can comprehend you much faster.

That's the first way to break down the communication barrier.

So that's step three, modify.

The A in iMA stands for Adapt.

You adapt the way that you behave to all the various different colours around you and that produces incredible magic.

Maybe you have a team of four people, all of whom are of a different colour.

But once they understand what it is that each other needs, they can work together incredibly well and allow their strengths to shine through.

The A in iMA can also stand for Appreciate - that you actually get to appreciate that, just like you have strengths and weaknesses, this other person has strengths and weaknesses as well that are just different from yours.

You've thought up until now that the other person is just a difficult soul.

But, in fact, they're not really difficult; they're just different from you.

So you have to minimally Accept the fact that they are different and that they do have different qualities than you.

If you're able to Appreciate them, then so much the better.

Now you are now working cooperatively instead of clashing with your client. You will be amazed at how differently your client meeting will feel now. Now one will have to wish you luck anymore. You will actually enjoy working not only with "that client" but with every client - appreciating their gifts and enjoying their company

But I want to get this into as many hands as possible because  I believe, as James Knight says, that iMA can change lives, iMA can improve the world and therefore the more hands that we can get this in, the better.

So please start by getting it into your hands by using the link below.