Keeping sane when the test is rigged.

Lots of customers are difficult.

My 1:1 client has an impossible customer. You know the type: constantly moving the goalpost; switching up expectations; chasing shiny objects, etc. Whimsical, but not in a fun way.

This had gone on for over a year, so it wasn’t threatening a contract, but it was bringing my client down, and even worse, the impending dread of failure was creeping into the edges of her personal life by keeping her up at night. She couldn’t rest while turning scenarios over and over in her mind to solve the puzzle of making her customer happy. 

Not good. In fact, I operate in the mindset that once agita of this nature follows you home at night, you have entered an emergency situation that needs solving, stat. 

(Let’s be honest, the ideal course of action might be to fire the customer, but most of us, even at the top of our field, don’t always have that luxury.)

In many situations, we can hone communication skills together or employ leadership tricks and principles to create better outcomes. However, there is a brand of executive who believes the only way to get results is to never be satisfied (or at least never admit to it). I believe this “caveman approach” is, frankly, bullshit. These are unreasonable people who have trained themselves so well in the art of dissatisfaction that even the most artful adjudicator is powerless to bring them to a middle ground. I refuse to measure success with them the way I might with reasonable people. Read: I won’t lose sleep over a moving target!

The impossible customer’s (or boss’s) all-or-nothing mentality can easily become our mentality if we’re not careful. In this case, I encouraged my client to do the one thing that is fair in this situation: move her own baseline. Since the customer had clearly pre-decided that they were only going to be happy 25% of the time, that 25% success rate would be her goal to aim for. 

Compare “I only nailed it 1 in 4 times for this client” to “I met the client’s expectations the maximum number of times that anyone ever has.” It has a nicer ring to it, no? 

I get it, this can feel like failure for type-A individuals. But remember: you’re playing by the same rules as the customer. If they can move the goalpost, so should you. You might sleep better, too (my client definitely does).