Be realistic with your customers. Do not feed false expectations

Raising clients' expectations in order to attract their attention to your services is a very common practice among those who practice coaching professionally.

This bad practice can lead to the appearance of serious problems, such as those associated with the dissatisfaction of the client's needs due to the generation of higher expectations than we are able to satisfy.

In addition to all this, there is a very significant ethical-moral component, since using resources such as these considerably damages the perception that your customers have of the image of your business.

During the development of this guide we will be addressing some of the elements that you should keep in mind when exchanging with your customers in a realistic way, without fostering false expectations of your results.

Expectations must remain realistic

The expectations we set for ourselves about something are nothing more than the vision we have of the possible results we will obtain once a series of events occur. These expectations are fed from various sources, where one of the most important is the one that comes from the desires and longings to achieve something that we are very anxious about.

Our exchange with the client should be as realistic as possible, always alluding to the possible results that can be obtained from honest work, not with false illusions or aggrandizing your skills, since sooner or later reality imposes itself.

When you talk to your clients about the possible results they can obtain through your coaching sessions, try to present them with a certain positive and negative margin.

Express yourself from the simultaneity of results that can be achieved depending on the commitment and effort that you dedicate when facing each specific situation.

Be realistic from a positive point of view

We must not confuse being realistic with being negative.

Obviously, reality can bring a touch of negativity if we have formed a very idealistic vision of the expected results. Work on providing a crossover of results that promote positive thinking, but are attached to reality. This way our emotions will remain stable and we will not generate discouragement in our clients if the results obtained are not as high as expected.

Prepare your clients for the possibility of negative results.

Sometimes even if we put all our efforts into solving a problem, we are not able to obtain positive results. Life situations are intervened by a series of fortuitous elements that alter our path and may cause our work to be perceived as unsatisfactory. The possibility of failure is always present, even when we have everything in our favor. If we are able to prepare our clients for the possibility that the results are not as desired, we will be able to prevent subsequent problems and complaints that affect the image of our business and the opinion that clients express about our performance.

Show yourself always interested in solving your clients' problems in a proactive way, giving everything you have and putting all your resources at the disposal of your clients' interest. If you are able to give everything you have and that this is perceived by those who have trusted you, the results will not alter the clients' vision, since they will be aware that the greatest effort has been made to optimize the results to the maximum.

Being realistic also implies being realistic with ourselves. That is why we should not be self-sufficient in the criterion that we will always achieve all objectives satisfactorily.