The Worst Addiction
Many a professional career has been crushed under the tyranny of an addiction. I’ve known fine lawyers who ended up as broken drunks, clever engineers who became hopeless crack-heads, and wonderful doctors whose out-of-control sex drive tanked their practices and their lives. You know such stories, too.
There is one addiction which is more insidious and more destructive than any other. It affects many of us, and while it doesn’t always destroy you, it will stunt your career, rob you of joy, and steal your financial success. What should be a place of satisfaction and prominence becomes a grey drudge, a sweatshop, a forty-year sentence before you can limp off into retirement.
Most addictions are simply too much of a good thing. Food, alcohol, sex, money – none of these are intrinsically evil. But when any of them becomes the center of your life and you lose the ability to say “No”, you have lost your autonomy and become a slave.
The worst addiction for professionals is one born of neediness and insecurity, fed on false gratification, leaving you chained and shackled, needing more and more. It’s the addiction to client approval.
We all want to be loved, we all crave approval. But when our need for client approval trumps our professionalism, or our ethics, or our economic good sense, we have an addiction and we have a problem. The surest sign of this addiction is the inability to say “No”.
It’s our job as professionals to provide what clients need, not what they want. The patient doesn’t want the doctor to confirm cancer, for example, but the doctor who dodges a negative diagnosis betrays her oath. If I take on a job because I want the client to like me when the job is outside my expertise and strength, I lay myself wide open to professional and personal grief.
Lawyers are particularly susceptible to the addiction of client pleasing. One of the sweetest personalities I’ve ever known was disbarred in disgrace because he couldn’t bring himself to say “No” to a charming, important, and wealthy client who used my friend as a dupe for fraud. Many of us suffer stunted careers because we can’t bring ourselves to refuse work or refuse clients who are not suited to our giftings.
The sad thing about saying “Yes” to work which does not match our giftings is that we end up having to work super hard to produce mediocre results, leaving our reputation dented and, ironically, suffering the disapproval of the very client from whom we wanted affection.
Failing to say “No” to rude and discourteous clients will eventually cause us to lose key staff members, who see no need to put up with jerks. Failing to say “No” to clients who are dodgy about payment means that we end up spending time away from family and friends, working for free for people we don’t like instead of spending quality time with people we do like.
Simply put, there are no upsides to becoming addicted to client approval. Our task is to exercise our giftings to resolve the client needs for which our giftings are suited, not to be dancing bears.
Paradoxically, when we discipline ourselves and our clients to ensure that we focus precisely on the exact nexus between the clients’ unique needs and our unique giftings, we end up doing masterful work, earning high compensation which the grateful client is happy to pay, and burnishing our reputation. The client almost invariably thinks we can walk on water and tells all their friends.
In other words, client approval is a byproduct of professional excellence, and professional excellence results from choosing work and clients suited to our giftings. If we try to put the cart before the horse, we fall into the merciless addiction to client approval, always coming up empty.
If this makes sense to you and you’d like to discuss it further, let me know!